eGroups.com Home: http://www.egroups.com/group/marxist-leninist-list www.egroups.com - Simplifying group communications OUR NEXT VIETNAM Stan Goff On my 19th birthday, I departed McChord Air Force Base in a C-141 for Vietnam. I was led to believe that I was going to fight for democracy there. The American people were being told the same thing. That was thirty years ago. When I arrived, I found the truth was substantially different. On the ground, we waged war not for democracy, but against the entire Vietnamese people. It took Americans almost 15 years, billions of dollars, and 58,000 American lives (as well as over 2,000,000 lives among the people of Southeast Asia), before we discovered that we had been manipulated by a vast military-industrial complex, a compliant press, and cynical political demagogues. In 1996, I retired from 3rd Special Forces after having participated in my last massive deception of the citizens of the United States-again allegedly to protect democracy-in Haiti. They are doing it again. The people of the United States are being led down the same garden path in Colombia. Under cover of the "fight against communism," we surrendered trillions of dollars from our national treasury to support some of the most notorious criminals in the world: Savimbi, D'Abuisson, Pinochet, Suharto, Lucas-Garcia, Diem, the list is long. Our treasury also supported drug traffickers. The CIA trained, equipped, and financed the opium empires of the Golden Triangle, the narcotics-financed Chinese Nationalists, the Corsican Mafia, the Sicilian Mafia, the American Mafia, Afghani-Pakistani heroin traders, the drug kings of the bloodthirsty Guatemalan G-2, Manuel Noriega, key members of Mexico's Guadalajara Cartel, the cocaine-financed Contras, drug traffickers with the Peruvian National Intelligence Service (SIN), the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (in fact, a Balkan Mafia responsible for over 20 percent of Europe's heroin imports), and the Cali drug cartel in Colombia. These activities were undertaken in every case not to protect anyone's democracy, but the profit margins of military industries, overseas investments, and transnational financial institutions. They still are. The profound irony-or the profound deception-is that the justification for U. S. military escalation in Colombia is that we are fighting drugs. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recently announced a $1.3 billion "aid package" for Colombia, to be coordinated by drug policy boss retired General Barry McCaffery with Colombian President Andres Pastrana. The lion's share of that "aid" is for the Colombian military. Colombia is already the third largest recipient of U. S. foreign aid in the world-most of that aid going to the military. To sell this aid package to the American people, we are being told that the aid is for counter-narcotics operations. The numerous U. S. military teams already training Colombia's armed forces are there to "assist in the counter-narcotics effort." I was on one of those teams in Colombia in 1992, with the same story. It was a lie then, and it is a lie now. We were explicitly told that due to political sensitivities, any discussion of the mission to Colombia-like all missions going down from 7th Special Forces-was to be represented as part of the counter-narcotics effort. This was not a directive to clarify our mission, but to clarify how we were to represent the mission in order to obfuscate the character of the training with which we were involved. Counter-insurgency training. We were based at Tolemaida, a Special Forces camp near the town of Melgar in the Rio Sumapaz Valley, and home to the Colombian commando school, Lancero. The troops we trained not only did not attempt to hide their mission-to prosecute the war against Marxist guerrillas-they were deployed to conduct operations on the weekend breaks during the training, and two of our students were killed in action while we were there. The Colombian Army was losing ground. Their officers were corrupt, many involved themselves in drug traffic. There was racism in the ranks directed at indigenous and Afro-Colombian troops. Some troops were suspected of entering the service to gain experience to join the guerrillas, and others were suspected of gaining their experience to go to work with the right-wing paramilitaries, who pay far more than the army. Their long standing record of abuses against civilians had completely lost them the confidence and support of the people in the countryside. And many of the officers-while physically tough and full of macho bravado-were incompetent planners and uninspiring leaders. Anyone who knows the history of Vietnam will remember that a similar situation existed in the Southern half of partitioned Vietnam, after the French were expelled by National Liberation Forces and the US took the role of colonial overseer. Ngo Dinh Diem, the hand picked mandarin of the US, exercised tenuous control over a hodge-podge of corrupt military factions, each representing different interests. President Andres Pastrana of Colombia finds himself in much the same situation today. Our job during my team's mission in Colombia was a follow-on training to skill previous teams had been teaching. We were to begin teaching the fundamentals of night patrolling and the integration of infantry operations with heliborne infiltration and extraction. A previous team of specially trained American chopper pilots had just finished teaching their Air Force rotor wing pilots how to fly "blacked out," that is, without lights while using night vision goggles. The subject of every hypothetical discussion with Colombian planners was how to fight guerrillas, and the tactical doctrine we were teaching was consistent with that. The U. S. military is involving itself not in counter-narcotics, but in a civil war. The doctrine we trained was not counter-narcotics, but counter-guerrilla. People who remember Vietnam should also find this very familiar. It began with a decision by the National Command Authority-the President, the National Security Advisor, the Secretary of Defense, et al-that we simply would not cede Vietnam under any circumstances. The interests that drove that decision were manifold. Anticommunist ideology, backed up by the successful propaganda of preceding years warning of the Communist "menace," simultaneously provided the excuse and gave the decision momentum of its own. While the strategic decision had more to do with filling the post-WWII colonial vacuum's with American influence, and with protecting current and future investments around the region-in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Indonesia. All these countries were eyeing China as a future trading partner, which threatened US dominance. In Latin America, many of the "problem" countries have opened talks with the Europeans, who are in an escalating trade dispute with the United States. In Colombia, the US interest is regional as well. Colombia sits in an oil and mineral rich region that includes Venezuela, Brazil, and Ecuador. Populist, anti-imperialist movements have resulted in the rapid increase in numbers of the Brazilian Workers Party and the Landless Movement in Brazil, in the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and the near revolution of last month in Ecuador. The US sees Colombia as the front lines against this current, and as a necessary foothold in the region. Kennedy won an uncomfortably close election against Nixon. Nixon relentlessly baited Kennedy for being "soft on communism." Now the demagoguery would be "soft on drugs." We ended up propping up an incompetent regime against a popular insurgency in Vietnam. Pastrana's administration is certainly being ripped apart by at least as many competing factions as Diem's. Pastrana, who is perceived by Colombian's as Washington's man. But he is under pressure to make a deal with the guerrillas to end the civil war. The demands of the guerrillas for land reform, crop subsidies, social services, and commodity price indexation, are considered off limits by the US administration. Recent attacks by the US corporate press against Pastrana-usually a precursor to the US foreign policy establishment dumping a client-should give Pastrana pause. His future might be that of Ngo Dinh Diem. We began becoming more directly involved in Vietnam by sending in "advisory assistance teams." In Colombia, the Clinton Administration is now requesting we raise the ceiling for U.S. military advisors from 100 to 170, and in the last counter-offensive against the guerrillas last July U.S. military pilots were flying active, direct support tactical reconnaissance missions during combat. One of those aircraft was lost, and the Department of Defense has had little to say about the circumstances. The US has requested permission for the construction of bases in Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, Venezuela, and Peru. So far, all have refused. The Colombian military is intimately linked to networks of right-wing paramilitaries-complete with death squads-that receive a large portion of their funding, aside from U.S. aid, from narcotics trafficking. Carlos Castano, head of the right-wing paramilitaries most closely coordinated with the Colombian military, has long been associated with the Cali Drug Cartel. His death squads control a wide swath of the north, where they assisted aggressive land grabs for companies like Occidental, Shell, BP, and Texaco, as well as guarding the drug export infrastructure there. In the past decade, conservative estimates put the number of their murders above 25,000, and 1.2 million peasants have been displaced by their violence. This displacement by violence and intimidation is directly supported by oil and mining companies in the regions, as well as big land owners. The land takeovers resulting from this activity have been the best recruiting tool the guerrilla forces have had. Not only does the FARC, and to a lesser extent the ELN, provide an outlet to fight back, they are the only force in the region that protects now landless peasants from further violence. Direct army complicity indicates to peasants that they are not involved in a struggle against right-wing renegades, but that they are being attacked by their own government on behalf of foreign investors. They see the guerrilla struggle, then, in the same terms that the Vietnamese National Liberation Front did-a fight against colonial rule enforced by the Colombian military and paramilitary as colonial surrogates. Carlos Castano took over direction of the largest paramilitaries from CIA asset, General Van Martinez in 1991, the same year that the CIA and U.S. Department of Defense assisted the Colombian military and paramilitaries to integrate their staff functions to more effectively coordinate their actions. Between the military and the paramilitary, Colombian forces are now committing the most massive human rights violations in this hemisphere. Said Carlos Salinas, Amnesty International's advocacy director for Latin America and the Caribbean, " If you liked El Salvador, you're going to love Colombia. It's the same death squads, the same military aid, and the same whitewash from Washington." Former Attorney General of the United States, Ramsey Clark, agrees. "We simply can't stand by while the United States government turns Colombia into another Vietnam." While Bill Clinton continually repeats his mantra that the proposed $1.7 billion aid package is "to preserve democracy and support human rights in that country"-a preposterous claim that goes largely unchallenged by the U.S. media, his drug tzar, Barry McCaffery recently blurted out, "It is to recover the southern part of the country." While the U.S. government provides direct and indirect support to elements in Colombia that profit most from the drug trade, they have launched a tidal wave of disinformation attempting to portray Colombian guerrillas as drug traffickers-a claim that President Pastrana himself, no friend of the Colombian insurgents, and former U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Miles Frechette, say lacks any evidence to support it. The demonization of this 35 year old popular insurgency is manufactured by the CIA and uncritically regurgitated by the U.S. mainstream press. While the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and others have levied taxes on grown coca in their sectors, they have taxed virtually any production. The increased production of coca by peasants has been decried by FARC leader Manuel Marulanda, who has long demanded that the government initiate a program for crop transition, agricultural subsidies, and the indexation of commodity prices. The increase has been directly related to transnational corporations and big landowners throwing more and more peasants off their land. Peasants are forced then to go to the forest, where they typically clear a few acres of land and grow the only cash crop on which they can make enough to survive: Coca. Taxes that the FARC levies on coca amount-according the U.S. intelligence estimates, which are probably high-around $30 million a year. The net profit from coca in Colombia is believed to be around $5 billion a year, meaning the "narco-guerrillas" that McCaffrey shakes like an evil fetish in front of Congress are pulling in a whopping six-tenths of a percent of the gross... from growers only, who have little choice. Ralph McGehee, former CIA officer says, "In Colombia today we attack 'narco guerrillas' or 'narco Communists' or 'narco terrorists,' as we quickly slide into the Latin version of the Vietnam quagmire. Does... intelligence recognize or reflect this-of course not." According to McGehee,, a highly decorated CIA veteran, "Disinformation is a large part of [the CIA's] covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target audience of its lies." As a veteran of a number of U.S. adventures, Vietnam, Guatemala, El Salvador, Grenada, Somalia, and Haiti, I have come to agree with these assessments. Citizens of this country need to protest loud and long, now, before we up the ante from our money to our blood. Colombian blood-plenty of it-is already paying the price of American involvement. Congress has not yet approved the latest proposal for an additional $1.7 billion, but McCaffrey and his minions are busily padding the Congressional halls, so there's no time to waste.
