August 5, 1999
COLOMBIA:
The Next Guatemala?
Anyone wanting a vivid snapshot of the rubble
of US policy toward Latin America should glance at Colombia,
where the Clinton Administration now has one foot over the brink
of a military intervention strongly reminiscent of John Kennedy's
initial deployments in Vietnam.
Colombia is in economic free fall and, as
Larry Birns of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs remarks, the
only comfort its beleaguered inhabitants can seize upon is that
the velocity of this collapse is at least slower than that of
neighboring Ecuador, now experiencing its worst economic slump
in seventy years. Colombia is currently suffering negative growth,
has an official unemployment rate of 19 percent and an actual
unemployment rate probably more than twice that figure. Austerity
programs imposed by the IMF and World Bank have closed off any
hope for that half of the country's population that lives below
the poverty line.
It shouldn't be this way. With a diversity
of exports, Colombia could have one of the strongest economies
of Latin America. But it's the same old story. Down the years
every US Administration has sent arms and advisers to prop up
Colombia's elites. US-assisted repression in Colombia has been
spectacularly appalling. According to the Permanent Committee
for the Defense of Human Rights in Colombia 3,832 political murders
were perpetrated in 1998, the bulk of them done by the army,
police and right-wing paramilitaries.
To lend a sense of perspective, this is about
twice the death toll in Kosovo that prompted charges of Serbian
genocide and that helped whip up sentiment for NATO's war on
Serbia. The US government is now preparing to escalate vastly
the money and weapons going to the Colombian military, far beyond
the $289 million in already scheduled assistance this year, making
Colombia the third-largest recipient of American aid, after Israel
and Egypt.
Congress has already appropriated another
half-billion for the drug war, with much of it going to Colombia.
Gen. Barry McCaffrey, director of the White House Office of National
Drug Control Policy, is asking for a further $1 billion for the
drug war over the next three years, said sum to go to the Andean
countries, with about half to Colombia alone. The Colombian military
is requesting yet another $500 million.
McCaffrey's request puts an end to any pretense
that there is somehow a distinction between US backing of counterinsurgency
and of counterdrug activities. A Congressional amendment has
forbidden US military aid to go to Latin American army units
with a documented record of human rights abuses. But in the pell-mell
rush to throw money at Colombia's military, such niceties are
being cast over the side.
The immediate cause of panic is the strength
of Colombia's main insurgency, run by the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC). In a peace-feeler several months ago,
President Andres Pastrana effectively ceded the FARC control
over a 16,000-square-mile slab of south-central Colombia, about
the size of Switzerland. The Clinton Administration was not entirely
unsympathetic to this overture, at least until a FARC commander
made the brutal and summary decision in February to execute the
three indigenous rights activists-Ingrid Washinawatok, Lahe'ena'e
Gay and Terence Freitas-who were working in the eastern Arauca
state on behalf of the U'wa Indians. The FARC did admit responsibility
but thereafter refused any of Washington's requests, such as
turning over the relevant commander. The FARC says it has to
be vigilant against spies and will regard US personnel as legitimate
targets.
Pastrana's decision to cede de facto control
of a slice of territory to FARC infuriated the military, which
has been increasingly humiliated by guerrilla strength that recently
brought FARC forces as close as twenty-five miles from Bogotá.
With a nominal force of 40,000 the Colombian Army currently has
around 6,000 to 7,000 frontline troops who are paid only a third
of what FARC's fighters receive. FARC can afford such a military
budget because of its taxes on drug cultivation and shipments
in the zones it controls.
For their part the FARC's leaders have questioned
whether Pastrana has the ability to deliver on any negotiated
settlement. Not without reason. Every single guerrilla group
agreeing to lay down its arms and enter the conventional political
arena has seen its members slaughtered by the paramilitaries
controlled by the army and the police.
There is a powerful lobby in Washington for
pouring money into counterinsurgency in Colombia. McCaffrey spouts
pieties about separating the drug war from counterinsurgency,
but says simultaneously that the United States is duty bound
to assist the Colombian government to beat off any threat. Colombian
police chief José Serrano has forged close links with
Senator Jesse Helms and Represetative Ben Gilman, who head the
foreign relations committees considering the requests for big
new appropriations to the Colombian military.
Already the Pentagon is sending planes and
personnel into Colombia. The US Army's intelligence-gathering
de Havilland RC-7 that crashed into a Colombian mountain in the
early hours of July 23 was almost certainly monitoring FARC deployments,
with such information being relayed to the Colombian military.
There are two faces to US policy towards Latin
America, both repulsive. The first is that of economic neoliberalism,
preaching the virtues of uninhibited trade, open markets, privatization,
structural adjustment. On the ground, across Latin America, we
see the consequence: social devastation in thirty-one kleptocracies,
all corrupt, many bankrupt.
The alternate face, whose baleful glare is
now fixed upon Columbia, is that of military repression. Bolstered
with fresh US cash, the Colombian military is probably planning
a direct coup unless Pastrana takes a hard-line stance to FARC
and other guerrilla insurgencies. For thirty years the United
States underwrote genocide in Guatemala. With 30,000 civilians
already killed Colombia could become its successor. The US Congress
should veto any aid or comfort.
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