>From: "Bill Howard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>STOP NATO: NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.HOME-PAGE.ORG
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Pakito Arriaran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Saturday, April 01, 2000 6:25 PM
>Subject: MLL: Colombia: The Politics of Escalation
>
>
> Colombia: The Politics of Escalation
> by Mark Cook
>
> 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
> Ejército de Liberación 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'état. 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
>
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