"Activist killings are not a result of capitalism, but a tactic of it." Colombia's War of Neoliberal Economics | NACLA Colombia Paramilitary Chief Says Businesses Back Him - The New York Times Colombia 1962. A U.S. Special Warfare team recommends a strategy for combatting the Left. The commander of the unit, General William Yarborough, was one of the first to advocate "paramilitary ... and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents." Colombia's Killer Networks: The Military-Paramilitary Partnership and the United States - Human Rights Watch The CIA "worked with Colombian military officers on the 1991 intelligence reorganization that resulted in the creation of killer networks that identified and killed civilians suspected of supporting guerrillas." "Plan Colombia." The U.S. military program (arms, training, intelligence) began in late 1999 but as of mid-2000, few governments are "willing to climb aboard what is widely perceived as an American project to clean up its backyard." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/apr/13/martinhodgson Colombia horrified by massacre of workers | News | EL PAÍS in English Under the guise of the "drug war", U.S.-backed fumigation destroyed "legal food crops" while the paramilitaries "violently expropriated land from indigenous people, peasants, and settlers." Drug Cultivation, Fumigation and the Conflict in Colombia | Transnational Institute State convicted for "the worst massacre" in the history of Colombia's armed conflict The Pentagon's psyops manual called for identifying the insurgent's "sympathizers" and "instilling fear for collaborating." https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_7YZ1w7Xj6TKPqWh3KG9hO2ysK-wO5rT/view?usp=drivesdk According to New York Times reporter Larry Rohter, "ordinary Colombians" were "angered" by the government’s decision to withdraw troops from a large FARC-controlled region, and the "embittered residents" of that region also opposed the guerrillas. No evidence was cited. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/americas/042600colombia-rebels.html Colombian military analyst Alfredo Rangel saw it differently. He "makes a point of reminding interviewers that the FARC has significant support in the regions where it operates." https://books.google.com/books/about/Looking_for_History.html?id=5oeiLqS35eQC Moreover, "the leader of the paramilitaries [Carlos Castano] acknowledged in a television interview that the drug trade provided 70 percent of the group’s funding." A Global Overview of Narcotics-Funded Terrorist and other Extremist Groups Chiquita admits to paying terrorists | NBC News
I would park an aircraft carrier on both sides of central America, declare war, drop leaflets and use all media to inform the citizens that if you are with the cartels, you are at war with the US, give them 2-4 weeks of flyovers, shows of force, then bomb the crap out of these cartels' fancy villas and operations sites.
Yeah you aren't going to convince me of that. This is about people making money off poisoning people. Too much money in that trade to attribute the violence to anything else. These cartels are probably making more than the Colombian GDP; that's going to cause political violence. I firmly believe that because of the profit motive, this would all continue even if everyone in the US government, CIA, and Pentagon dropped dead tomorrow.
The drug war was just a pretext. Despite the U.S. dumping over $10 billion in military aid into Colombia since 2000, "coca cultivation has been soaring in Colombia, with a significant increase over the last couple of years in acreage dedicated to drug crops." "The paramilitaries, while opponents in the war on drugs, were technically on the same side as the Colombian and American governments in the civil war." Indeed, they were viewed by Washington as "freedom fighters" whose role is actually a "mitigating rather than aggravating factor in their cases." The Secret History of Colombia's Paramilitaries and the U.S. War on Drugs
The cartels exist ONLY because of the worldwide drug prohibition led by the US. We keep that prohibition going so that our boys in the CIA can participate in it.
