COLOMBIA: THE POLITICS OF ESCALATION

The U.S. government is sabotaging the Colombian peace process through the
classic strategy of imperialist intervention and massive escalation of that
country's civil war. It is the same strategy that was used in Vietnam and
Central America.

The escalation can only be understood in a regional context. The aggressive
land takeovers in Colombia by transnational oil and mining corporations and
their use of paramilitary death squads to expel the peasants has inevitably
contributed to the rapid growth of the insurgency. More and more of the poor
join the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the Ejercito
de Liberacion Nacional (ELN).

The events in Colombia, largely produced by transnational and Colombian big
business, come on top of the overwhelming election of Hugo Chavez as
President of neighboring Venezuela and his commitment to policies of
national sovereignty. Domestic developments in both countries are seen as
endangering U.S. imperial domination in the area.

In an incident that suggests serious concern in U.S. business and government
circles about threats to corporate and military control of the strategic and
oil-rich Colombia-Venezuela sector, the U.S. media blacked out coverage of a
summit of 48 countries of the European Union, Latin America, and the
Caribbean, held in Rio de Janeiro in late June. The meeting proclaimed a
"new era" in European-Latin American relations. The meeting of so many heads
of state and government, with potentially profound consequences for U.S.
corporate dominance in Latin America, was completely censored from the New
York Times and the Washington Post, as well as the major television
networks, although they could not possibly have been ignorant of it. The
Wall Street Journal gave the story three paragraphs on page eight.
(1)

U.S. officials are responding by pressuring Ecuador, Argentina and unnamed
Central American countries to set up a string of new U.S. military bases.
They speak openly of attempting to "revise" (that is, abrogate) the Panama
Canal Treaty which requires the abandonment of all U.S. bases in Panama. But
opposition to bases is intense throughout the region, and U.S. officials
acknowledge that they dare not name the Central American states they are
approaching for fear of fomenting discontent in those countries. (2)

In Colombia, Clinton administration officials claim to be supporting
President Andres Pastrana's peace negotiations with the country's leftwing
insurgents, a process initiated a year ago by Pastrana in fulfillment of an
election campaign promise. But Washington's multibillion dollar arms
shipments and troop deployments strengthen the dreaded Colombian army, which
has made clear that it has no interest in peace.

Clinton policies bear a striking resemblance to the Reagan administration
tactic in the mid-1980s of professing support for the Contadora Central
American peace process as an excuse to escalate the Central American wars.
Now, Clinton administration officials give perfunctory praise to Pastrana's
peace negotiations, while joining the Colombian military in denouncing
Pastrana for "giving away the store" in the negotiations. (3)

The decision by the Clinton administration to name General Barry McCaffrey,
former head of the U.S. Southern Command, or SouthCom, as the White House
"drug czar" was interpreted at the time as a way of escalating Colombia's
almost unbelievably bloody civil war by dressing it up as a war on drugs.
His replacement at SouthCom was Gen. Charles Wilhelm, who immediately began
to speak of direct counterinsurgency assistance for the Colombian military.
Wilhelm declared that criticism of military abuses of human rights was
"unfair" and said that guerrillas abused human rights more often than
Colombian security forces or paramilitary death squads. This was wildly
false, even contradicting the State Department's own annual report. (4)

No Mention of Death Squads

Few of the reports in a massive U.S. media campaign supporting increased aid
to Colombia even mention the existence of "paramilitary" death squads
trained by U.S. Special Forces and closely tied to the Colombian military.

Presented instead is the new line, as summed up by Investors Business Daily:
that Colombia's insurgencies control "40 to 60 percent of the countryside";
that they "lack popular support" but are awash in drug money, some $600 to
$800 million; that the U.S. has spent years trying to "fight the drug war
but not Colombia's guerrilla insurgency," (5) but that "this month, U.S.
drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey finally admitted that's no longer possible."
(6)

Selling such a story is hard. Even official and semi-official agencies of
the Empire have conceded that the bulk of the killing and the drug-dealing
is being done by their own allies. The U.S. State Department, as well as
establishment human rights groups, blame the government-connected
paramilitaries for the overwhelming majority of all political killings in
1998. (7) And as the Economist of London has written, "the right-wing
paramilitary groups and the traffickers they protect are far deeper into
drugs-and the DEA [U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration] knows it." (8)

It is an open secret that the military units sponsored by SouthCom are among
the largest drug traffickers, as are the rightwing paramilitary death squads
formed by U.S. trainers years ago. They also hold a northern fiefdom from
which they control "land, people, drug laboratories, and shipping routes for
drugs and arms to and from the Caribbean and Central America." (9) The
Colombian air force is widely reputed to be a major drug cartel itself. In
November 1998, a half ton of cocaine was found on board the airplane of the
chief of the Colombian Military Air Transport Command when it landed in
Miami. (10)

U.S. officials publicly denounced the government of Pastrana's predecessor,
President Ernesto Samper, for his alleged receipt of millions in campaign
contributions from drug dealers. Colombia was "decertified" for its failure
to collaborate with Washington in the "drug war," and cut off from a wide
range of aid and trade deals. But at the same time, the U.S. was sharply
increasing aid and arms sales to Colombia's military, while loudly and
repeatedly "decertifying" the government the military was sworn to support.
For the last two years of Samper's government, when he was publicly declared
"persona non grata" by Washington, U.S. ties to Colombia's military grew
exponentially. Pastrana assumed office in 1998.

Stopping Paramilitaries

President Pastrana has said he would comply with the insurgents' key demand,
to stop the paramilitaries, but seems unwilling or unable to do so. Leaders
of paramilitary organizations operate with impunity, giving press interviews
and even walking in and out of Colombian military bases.

In the same fashion, the real history of the paramilitaries is studiously
ignored by the U.S. media. The FARC negotiated a settlement at the beginning
of the decade, formed the UP, an electoral political party, and won a
stunning series of victories in local and regional elections. Almost all of
the thousands elected have since been systematically murdered.

When complaints were recently raised about the U.S. government and media
failing to mention the paramilitaries, Gen. McCaffrey changed his tune
slightly and asserted that the U.S. military aid plan was to help the
Colombian military fight the "narco-guerrillas" and the paramilitaries. (11)
The Washington Post and the Miami Herald followed suit with stories claiming
that U.S. military personnel were training the Colombian military to respect
human rights. (12)

Big business interests, both Colombian and transnational, also have
regularly joined forces with paramilitaries to terrorize poor farmers off
their land. If the peasants do not leave, they are killed by the death
squads. Either way, the corporation can then seize the land or buy it for
practically nothing.

Beyond Washington's other concerns, demands put forth by Colombian
insurgents for curing the cocaine plague with agricultural subsidies for
alternative crops would contradict and endanger New World Order economic
policies for Latin America.

President Pastrana is no progressive-minded pacifist, and the Colombian
government is suspected by many of using negotiations with Colombia's rebels
to buy time while the U.S. increases the military buildup. The U.S.
escalation appears to have been what provoked the FARC's offensive in July.

The previous March, U.S. intelligence dramatically increased its
collaboration with the Colombian military, particularly through the use of
spy planes to aid in attacks on the rebels. The "sharing of intelligence"
from the spy planes was lauded by U.S. Southern Command officials as having
had devastating effect on the rebels in military engagements. A spy plane
crashed in the midst of a rebel offensive in late July, reportedly setting
back U.S. efforts considerably. (13)

Multinational Force

Meanwhile, U.S. officials began pressuring Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, Peru,
and Venezuela to cooperate with U.S. intelligence and the Colombian military
to fight Colombia's insurgency. U.S. officials pushed those countries and
Argentina to form a multinational military force to intervene in Colombia,
according to reports from semi-official media outlets in Peru and elsewhere.

The proposal for a multinational military force to intervene in Colombia was
rejected by the governments involved, and Washington hastily denied that
anything of the sort had been mentioned.

But only a month before, Washington publicly proposed exactly such a force
to the General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS). U.S.
diplomats called for a "group of friendly countries" (linked economically or
politically) to intervene in internal conflicts that are judged to threaten
"democracy" in any country in Latin America.

That goes far beyond a 1991 OAS provision, also pushed through at U.S.
insistence, that would allow intervention in the case of an extreme and
immediate threat, such as a coup d'etat. Acting U.S. Assistant Secretary of
State Peter Romero called the new proposal "preventative diplomacy." "This
is a way to make sure a potentially manageable brush fire does not burn down
the forest," Romero said.

Jamaica called the measure "paternalistic" and the Peruvian foreign minister
declared that "all actions of the OAS should be directed so each
country...is responsible for dealing with its own problems, maintaining
always its sovereignty."

Objections centered on who would determine if a crisis was serious enough to
warrant intervention, as well as the form and degree of intervention
necessary. (14)

Although the proposal was repudiated by Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador,
Mexico, Peru and Venezuela, it will be returned to committee and U.S.
authorities believe they can push it through next year. "We never hoped that
the proposal would be approved at this session, we just wanted to put the
matter on the table for discussion," U.S. representative to the OAS Victor
Marrero remarked. (15)

Flouting Leahy Amendment

Meanwhile, as Washington has been engaged in a massive escalation of the
war, it has been flouting both the spirit and the letter of the Leahy
Amendment (introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy [Dem.-Vt.]), which forbids aid
administered by the State Department to Colombian military units where
personnel have engaged in gross human rights abuses. That amounts to the
overwhelming majority of the units of the Colombian army. (16)

Although the Leahy Amendment specifically includes aid to counter-narcotics
efforts, the Pentagon and the CIA feel themselves under no obligation to
comply, since their programs are not counter-narcotic but counter-guerrilla.
(17)

The small group of Republicans who have led the campaign on Colombia
bitterly attacked the Leahy Amendment and tried unsuccessfully to have it
removed from the 1998 foreign operations bill, saying that human rights
concerns hampered the "drug war."

The group is led by Republican Representatives Dan Burton of Indiana and
Benjamin Gilman of New York, whose collaboration with the Colombian military
is so extreme that they have practically been made honorary members. (Both
have had helicopters named after them. "Big Ben" is still flying; Burton's
has crashed. (18)) They are the source of the allegation that the guerrillas
in Colombia are earning $600 to $800 million a year in the drug trade and
using the money to buy weapons, figures ridiculed even by U.S. intelligence
reports. (19)

Gen. McCaffrey's televised House committee appearances are carefully
stage-managed affairs, aimed at depicting the Colombian security forces as
helpless against unpopular but drug-rich and heavily armed guerrillas. House
members plead for more helicopters to interdict the drugs. Following the
script, McCaffrey agrees that this is urgently necessary but points out that
the Colombians lack enough trained helicopter pilots, implying that the
Colombians should use U.S. personnel, either current or "retired" military
who would be hired as soldiers of fortune. In fact, as Tod Robberson of the
Dallas Morning News has reported, large numbers of such "ex-military"
mercenaries already have been recruited. (20)

At present, Colombia is the fourth largest recipient of U.S. aid-after
Israel, Egypt, and Jordan-with most of the aid in the form of arms. U.S.
officials have ceased even to pretend seriously that the aid is to combat
cocaine trafficking. (21)

Washington's orchestrated attack on President Pastrana seems ironic. The
Harvard graduate from Colombia's ruling elite was perceived by ordinary
Colombians as having been handpicked by U.S. officials. (22)

As part of the attack on Pastrana, the media blitz has begun highlighting
Colombia's desperate economic straits, including the worst depression in
decades, a growing debt burden and a 20 percent unemployment rate. That
unemployment rate compares favorably with a number of Latin American
governments considered "friendly" to Washington and much-praised in the U.S.
corporate media. The fact that the media are showing such unusual concern
for Colombia's unemployed adds to the feeling in Bogota that U.S.
authorities are setting Pastrana up for the chopping block. (23)

The same news reports credulously pass along intelligence agency claims that
Colombia has managed to develop a new super-strain of coca leaf, making it
unnecessary for drug dealers to import the material from Peru and Bolivia,
as in the past, and asserting that Colombian "narco-guerrillas" are earning
fantastic revenues as a result.

No effort is made to explain the obvious discrepancy between Colombia's
undoubted economic straits and the fantastic new wealth supposedly pouring
into the country because of the "super-strain" of drugs. If the claim that
at least $5 billion in drug profits flow into Colombia annually is accurate,
that amounts to $125 per year for every adult and child in Colombia. (A
subsequent AP report on a mass arrest of alleged Colombian drug dealers
claimed that the gang was earning $5 billion a month. (24))

Undeterred, the media also continue to cite a CIA report that coca crops
increased 28% in Colombia last year. That report was rejected by Colombian
National Police Chief Rosso Jose Serrano, who, the Colombia Bulletin
reports, showed his own aerial photographs and satellite images obtained
from the French space agency to counter the CIA assertions.

"The worldwide chief of the U.N. Drug Control Program, Pino Arlacchi, said
CIA methods fall short because the agency relies almost exclusively on
satellites, rarely checking on the ground to see if the coca plants are,
indeed, dead," the Bulletin reported. (25)

While there may not be an "explosion" of coca leaf cultivation, it is
probably true that it has increased as transnational corporations (mostly
oil and mining) and landlords use paramilitary death squads. Many of the
displaced-who now number between a million and a million and a half
people-have gone to the edge of the rain forest where they usually clear
between three and five hectares of land and grow coca leaf, the only crop
that will allow them to survive.

As Colombia's insurgent groups have pointed out, if the U.S. Empire wants to
end the cultivation of coca leaves, the only way is to provide these
marginalized peasants with a crop and a market which will enable them to
feed their families. That requires either: (1) agricultural subsidies of the
kind that have existed in the United States and Western Europe for decades
but which are forbidden to the poorer nations of the world under the New
World Order; or (2) the indexation of commodity prices, a demand made by the
Non-Aligned Movement for years.

If the claims of economic collapse are greatly exaggerated, at least by
current Latin American standards, and the claims of a dramatic increase in
coca leaf production are also greatly inflated, if not simply false, that
would answer the assertion that a country is sinking into economic
destitution at the same time that a principal export crop is off the charts.

But it does not explain why the U.S. media have picked up on this line now.
Usually, these stories of economic distress are the standard media fare for
countries whose governments the U.S. is seeking to overthrow, such as Cuba,
Sandinista Nicaragua, or Popular Unity Chile.

Is the U.S. preparing to overthrow Pastrana or make him, Central American
style, into a useless decoration on a military-death squad regime? What is
certain is that the insistence by the U.S. government and imperial media on
calling the FARC and ELN "narco-guerrillas" and "narco-terrorists"
completely invalidates Pastrana's peace initiative.

Pastrana has insisted that the guerrillas are nothing of the sort. The
common agenda for peace talks, which he signed with the guerrillas last May,
"implicitly recognizes that the revolutionaries took up arms in a just cause
and commits both parties to negotiate profound economic and social reforms
through political compromise," wrote former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador,
Robert White recently. (26) They include land reform, especially through
confiscation and redistribution of huge land holdings obtained through drug
profits, an end to the cultivation of illicit drugs, and a crackdown by the
Colombian army on the paramilitary death squads.

But U.S. officials have been heavily involved with forming the death squads
since the beginning. Until Pastrana is able to make good on these last
commitments, it is absurd to demand, as Washington has, that the rebels
abandon their commitment to the peasants and labor organizers who depend on
them, and leave them at the mercy of the paramilitary death squads.

Footnotes

1. Agence France-Presse report, El Diario/La Prensa, June 30, 1999, p. 11.

2. Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering and drug czar Gen. Barry
McCaffrey, Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony, Oct. 6, 1999.
Honduran military bases used in the Central American wars of the 1980s are
ruled out because they are surrounded by mountains and lack sufficiently
long runways for AWACs and other heavy aircraft.

3. "Despite their early hopes for Mr. Pastrana, however, United States
officials generally describe his efforts to negotiate with the guerrillas as
a failure that has left the insurgents stronger and more defiant," wrote the
New York Times in a front-page story Sept. 15. It added that administration
officials "say they have made it clear to the Colombians" that increased
American support will come with pressure for "a new, probably tougher
Government approach to the peace talks with the insurgents."

4. As noted in Human Rights Watch, "Human Rights Developments: Colombia,"
1998.

5. Investors Business Daily, Aug. 25, 1999, p. 1.

6. Ibid.

7. "Colombia on the Brink," Foreign Affairs, Summer 1999, p. 17. As Human
Rights Watch has noted, op. cit., n. 4, although exact figures remained
difficult to confirm, the Data Bank run by the Center for Research and
Popular Education (Centro de Investigacion y Educacion Popular, CINEP) and
the Intercongregational Commission of Justice and Peace (Justice and Peace),
human rights groups, reported that of those killed for political reasons in
1998 where a perpetrator was suspected, 73 percent of the killings were
attributed to paramilitaries, 17 percent were attributed to guerrillas, and
10 percent to state agents.

8. Quoted in Nick Trebat, "U.S. Policy Towards Colombia About To Massively
Veer Off-Track: Drugs replace communism as the point of entry for U.S.
policy on Latin America," Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Aug. 24, 1999.

9. "Guns, drugs and a slim chance for peace," Irish Times, July 13, 1999.

10. Robert E. White, "The Wrong War: Our Guns and Tanks Won't Bring An End
to Colombia's Civil Strife," Washington Post, Sept. 12, 1999, p. B1.

11. PBS Newshour, Sept. 22, 1999.

12. This was reminiscent of similar media stories in the 1980s extolling the
U.S. formation from scratch of the Atlacatl Battalion in El Salvador, a
military unit which it was asserted would have special human rights training
that would gradually improve the behavior of the rest of the Salvadoran
army. Atlacatl turned out to be responsible for the worst atrocities of the
Salvador war. Apparently no one was surprised by this, for no serious U.S.
media or congressional effort has ever been undertaken to establish how this
could have happened.

Years later, even after revelations of the Battalion's involvement in some
of the worst atrocities of the war, from the El Mozote massacre at the
beginning to the Jesuit murders at the end, the New York Times called it
"the pride of the United States military team in San Salvador.... [T]rained
in antiguerrilla operations, the battalion was intended to turn a losing war
around." Clifford Krauss, "How U.S. Actions Helped Hide Salvador Human
Rights Abuses," New York Times, Mar. 21, 1993, p. A1.

13. Although the spy plane was supposedly aimed at drug interdiction, it
crashed an improbably long distance from where it was supposed to be
operating. Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 25, 1999.

14. Stratfor Global Intelligence Update, June 10, 1999.

15. The effort to push through such a measure harkens back to 1979 when the
Carter administration requested OAS backing for an invasion of Nicaragua,
one month before the Sandinista triumph over the Somoza dictatorship. In an
unprecedented show of independence, the OAS rejected the Carter proposal and
accused the U.S. of interference. (Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had
presented the proposal as a "peacekeeping force" aimed at preventing an
imminent "humanitarian and political disaster" in Nicaragua.)

16. Op. cit., n. 4. The report listed the names of Colombian military units
that form death squads and/or actively promote, support and take part in
paramilitary activities. "These [units] make up over 75 percent of the
Colombian army," it concludes.

17. An aide to Sen. Leahy reportedly told Tod Robberson of the Dallas
Morning News that "previous Pentagon attempts to avoid applying those
restrictions prompted Sen. Leahy earlier this month to draft legislation
requiring compliance. Although the Defense Department has said it would
agree to the proposed law, he said, the CIA rejects such restrictions."
("U.S. launches covert program to aid Colombia Military, mercenaries hired,
sources say," Dallas Morning News, Aug. 19, 1998.

18. So do many of Burton's enterprises. Burton reportedly hands out copies
of the memoirs of deposed Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza to Central
American visitors to his office.

19. See New York Times, Sept. 15, 1999, p. A14. The $600 to $800 million
figure is flatly contradicted by official U.S. findings, which claim that no
more than $30 to $100 million reaches guerrilla hands, largely through a war
tax on peasants. Ibid. But even if the higher figures were true, U.S.
officials also claim that at least $5 billion in drug profits flow into
Colombia every year. Who is receiving the rest?

20. Op. cit., n. 17.

21. "While fighting drugs will remain a central goal, the United States is
about to make a broader commitment to support Colombia's embattled
Government than it has in years." New York Times, Sept. 15, 1999, p. A1.

22. "Nor do those [U.S.] officials hide their view that Colombia's multiple
crises may be beyond Mr. Pastrana's ability to resolve." New York Times,
Sept. 15, 1999, p. A14.

23. Much of the U.S. administration's treatment of President Pastrana is
disquietingly reminiscent of official U.S. reaction to President Ngo Dinh
Diem in Saigon in 1963. U.S. officials learned in the autumn of that year
that Diem was engaged in secret negotiations with Hanoi and the National
Liberation Front to make South Vietnam neutral and to ask the Americans to
leave. They immediately ordered the overthrow of Diem, whom they had
installed as president of the U.S.-created republic, and his replacement
with military rulers. Diem and his brother (who had been the go-between in
the negotiations) were both murdered. Three weeks later, in a coincidence of
timing that continues to interest historians, U.S. President John Kennedy
was himself assassinated in Dallas. Diem was followed by a series of
revolving-door military governments, many of them overthrown in turn when
U.S. officials learned that they were engaged in peace negotiations.

24. AP dispatch, Hoy (New York), Oct. 14, 1999.

25. "Congressional Cowboys Shoot for Big, Bad War," Colombia Bulletin,
Summer 1999, p. 8.

26. Op. cit., n. 10.