Terrorizing Colombia

Horhey · Sep 8, 2015

America's Other War: Terrorizing Colombia, Doug Stokes, 2005

Colombia 1962: Washington introduces "death squads" (clandestine paramilitary groups) to Latin America. Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, Colombia's former Minister of Foreign Affairs, served as the President of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights:

In the 1960s the United States, during the Kennedy administration, took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads. These initiatives ushered in what is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine, ...not defense against an external enemy, but a way to make the military establishment the masters of the game... [with] the right to combat the internal enemy, as set forth in the Brazilian doctrine, the Argentine doctrine, the Uruguayan doctrine, and the Colombian doctrine: it is the right to fight and to exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists. And this could mean anyone, including human rights activists such as myself.
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The objective, as explained by Lars Schoultz, the foremost U.S. academic specialist on human rights in Latin America, was "to destroy permanently a perceived threat to the existing structure of socioeconomic privilege by eliminating the political participation of the numerical majority, principally the working or (to use a broader, more accurate term) popular classes." As part of Washington's strategy of converting the Latin American military from "hemispheric defense" to "internal security"—meaning war against the domestic population—Kennedy dispatched a U.S. Army Special Warfare team to Colombia in 1962 headed by General William Yarborough:

Visit to Colombia, South America, By a Team From U.S. Special Warfare Center, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, February 26, 1962

It is the considered opinion of the survey team that a concerted country team effort should be made now to select civilian and military personnel for clandestine training. This structure should be used to as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known Communist proponents.

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—the "communist extremists" to whom Vizquez Carrizosa alludes:

Plan Colombia, Noam Chomsky, Excerpted from Rogue States, 2000

Meanwhile, deplorable socioeconomic conditions persist, leaving much of the population in misery in a rich country with concentration of wealth and land-ownership that is high even by the shameful standards of Latin America generally. The situation became worse in the 1990s as a result of the “neoliberal reforms” formalized in the 1991 constitution, which reduced still further “the effective participation of civil society” in policy formation by “reforms intended to enhance executive power and reduce the autonomy of the judicial and legislative branches, and by concentrating macroeconomic planning in the hands of a smaller circle of technocrats”—in effect, adjuncts of Washington. The “neoliberal reforms have also given rise to alarming levels of poverty and inequality; approximately 55 percent of Colombia’s population lives below the poverty level” and “this situation has been aggravated by an acute crisis in agriculture, itself a result of the neoliberal program,” as in Latin America generally (Arlene Tickner, general coordinator of the Center for International Studies at the University of the Andes, Bogota, “Colombia: Chronicle of a Crisis Foretold,” Current History, Feb. 1998).

In 1999, Colombia became the leading recipient of US military and police assistance, replacing Turkey (Israel and Egypt are in a separate category). Colombia receives more US military aid than the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean combined. The total for 1999 reached about $300 million, along with $60 million in arms sales, approximately a threefold increase from 1998. The figure is scheduled to increase still more sharply with the anticipated passage of some version of Clinton’s Colombia Plan, submitted to Congress in April 2000, which called for a $1.6 billion “emergency aid” package for two years. Through the 1990s, Colombia has been by far the leading recipient of US military aid in Latin America, and has also compiled by far the worst human rights record, in conformity with a well-established and long-standing correlation.

Continued....
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Terrorizing Colombia

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