U.S. MILITARY PACKAGE FOR COLOMBIA CONTINUES A POLICY OF DOMINATION

Exploitation, Not Generosity, Guides Foreign Aid

THE U.S. SENATE is considering a $13 billion package of primarily military
aid to Colombia requested by the Clinton administration under the guise of
the "war on drugs." The package includes advanced weaponry, including jet
fighters and helicopter gun ships, as well as increased U.S. training of
Colombia's military forces. This consistently fits the pattern of the U.S.
system of global domination and repression.

Colombia is already the largest recipient of U.S. weapons and training in
Latin America and has been throughout the 1990s. It also has had the worst
record of human-rights abuses in Latin America during this period, with
rampant death squads, disappearances, widespread torture and massacres of
entire villages and internal refugees. Colombia also has severe, widespread
poverty that has led its people to rebel against the U.S.-supported
oligarchy of landowners, narco-traders and wealthy capitalists. They are
making vast profits through selling off Colombia's rich resources and cheap
labor to U.S. transnational corporations.

Colombia follows the classic pattern of countries under U.S. domination.
The exploitation by a tiny ruling class becomes so severe that the people
finally rebel. Then comes a vast increase in human-rights abuses and
massacres along with a vast increase in U.S. military training and
shipments of U.S. weapons to the repressive regime. With U.S. military
support, atrocities mount until the exhausted people give up and accept
their hunger and misery passively. Our government calls this "restoring
democracy."

This is exactly what happened in the nightmare regimes of El Salvador and
Guatemala during the 1980s, both military oligarchies trained and supplied
by the United States. There were massive government atrocities against
those populations and a large, semisecret paramilitary apparatus of terror
and death in which military personnel would remove uniforms to go out at
night and eliminate any opposition who spoke out against the regime. The
same thing is happening in Colombia today.

The repression in El Salvador and Guatemala has diminished since these
terrified, brutalized populations exhausted their spirit of resistance and
signed "peace accords" in the early 1990s. The massive poverty that was the
cause of their resistance has only increased due to programs being forced
upon those peoples by the International Monetary Fund. This has been the
pattern throughout Latin America since World War II.

This U.S. foreign policy of repression is not an accident. Secret policy
planners understood that we had emerged at the top of a global system of
economic exploitation and that the poverty of most of the world's
population forced them to accept our conditions and our exploitation of
their resources and cheap labor.

U.S. planners made this policy explicit in then top-secret documents that
have only since been declassified. The National Security Council, State
Department and Pentagon still operate in secret. We will not know what they
are thinking now until their documents are declassified in 25 years. But we
can examine the ugly history of their actions: their bombing of country
after country, their subversion of democracy around the world and their
support for military repression globally during every decade since World
War II.

In 1948, George Kennan, later ambassador to the Soviet Union, summarized in
one such State Department document: "We have about 50 percent of the
world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population.... In this
situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real
task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which
will permit U.S. to maintain this pattern of disparity.... To do so ... we
should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human
rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is
not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.
The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."

U.S. leaders were repudiating a foreign policy based on promoting human
rights or democracy and planning one based on "straight-power concepts."
This means nothing else but military repression.

This system was refined and made official during the Kennedy administration
as it developed the doctrine of training foreign militaries for "internal
security" - to make war on their own populations. Since 1962, the United
States has trained the military of nearly every Latin American country in
military training centers whose graduates are infamous for torture,
repression and massacre of their own populations.

American citizens will not see the truth about Colombia and the lie of "the
war on drugs" unless we are willing to look at history - its repeated
invasions, bombings, economic blockades and support for vicious, repressive
military regimes worldwide.

Passage of this Senate bill for yet another massive increase in military
aid to Colombia can be stopped. Democracy and decent government cannot
happen without the active involvement of citizens. A decent and moral
foreign policy will only happen if we are willing to demand it.

GLEN T. MARTIN is professor of philosophy and religious studies at Radford
University.