A VIETNAM IN LATIN AMERICA?

DURING his trip to Colombia last week, President Clinton had said: "This is
not Vietnam." He assured Colombia's neighbors that the US would not abandon
them. "We have funds that can be used to help other countries solve their
problems."

But these other countries, neighbors of Colombia, are far from reassured. In
a meeting in the Brazilian capital of Brasilia over the weekend, South
American presidents expressed support for Colombia's fight against leftist
guerillas but also expressed concern about possible Vietnamization of the
area. They fear that the 40-year-old civil war in Colombia may spillover
into other states because of the US-funded Colombian military crackdown
against rebel groups.

President Clinton has announced $1.3 billion in US aid to Colombia, much of
which will go to the military. The military will use it against the leftist
forces, which are supposed to draw much of their financing from the drug
trade. If there is continued reliance on military means rather than on
tackling the underlying social and economic causes which fuel insurgency and
revolt, then, Colombia's neighbors argue, the drug trade and the rebels
might be driven into their borders. Brazil, for instance, feels that arms
traffickers and drug traders might start using the Amazon forest as a
sanctuary.

The entire problem is caused by America's misplaced emphasis on helping the
army rather than Colombians in need. This has been lucidly explained in an
article in the summer issue of the Harvard International Review by Prof Noam
Chomsky entitled "In a league of its own: assessing US rogue behavior".

Prof Chomsky writes that Colombia has replaced Turkey as the largest
recipient of US military aid ("Israel and Egypt are in a separate category")
although that country has the worst human rights record in the hemisphere
since the beginning of the 1990s. The distinguished scholar adds: "US
contributions to the Colombian tale of horrors date back to the Kennedy
administration. Heading a military mission in 1962, General William
Yarborough of the Special Welfare Center advised the Colombian military that
they should 'as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist
activities against known communist proponents.' Under this wide-ranging
concept, the state is accorded the right 'to fight and to exterminate social
workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the
establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists,' as observed
bitterly by the president of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human
Rights and former minister of foreign affairs Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa.

"Though Colombian violence is rooted in 'poverty and insufficient land
reforms', he (Carrizosa) continues, as elsewhere in Latin America, 'it has
been exacerbated by external factors', primarily by the initiatives of the
Kennedy administration which 'took great pains to transform our regular
armies into counter-insurgency brigades ... and ushered in what is known in
Latin America as the national security doctrine'."

Thus, it seems, while institutionalized or state communism may not be a
threat any longer, American policy with regard to the struggle of left
organizations for a fairer deal continues unchanged.

The US has to travel a few miles yet before it draws the correct lesson from
the Vietnam debacle - and later from Iran and Iraq.