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July 29, 2002
Tom Stephens
Fast
Track and the
Hypocrites of the House
Linda Belanger
Why Do They Do It?
Alfredo Castro
Colombia's
Disappeared
Anne Brodsky
Inside Pakistan and
Afghanistan with RAWA
Andrew George
The Fires
of Summer:
Don't Blame the Greens
David Vest
A Blind Mule and
a Box of Medals
July 28, 2002
Bob Geary
Our Dinner
with Fidel Castro
July 27, 2002
Ian Daoust
The New
Mahler, Seattle Style
Gavin Keeney
Zizek
and Lenin
Ralph Nader
Citigroup
Heal Thyself
M. Shahid Alam
American
Presidents (Poem)
Mokhiber / Weissman
Push Back: Women Take
on the Corporate Beasts
July 26, 2002
Jerre Skog
American
Dictatorship:
It Couldn't Happen...Could It?
Philip Farruggio
Lie,
Rob and Steal
Rep. Ron Paul
Monitor
Thy Neighbor
Ron Jacobs
Thinking
About the
Weather (Underground)
Walt Brasch
Ashcroft's War on Bookstores
July 25, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Paul
Krugman's Howl:
Populism, War and
the Melting Economy
Gavin Keeney
Van Morrison: In September
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
War
on Terrorism or
Police State?
July 24, 2002
Gary Leupp
An Islam Primer
July 23, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Battle
for Zuni Salt Lake
Ansar Ahmed
Am I with You, George?
Bill Christison
The
Disastrous Foreign Policies of the US: Oppression Abroad Means
Repression at Home
July 22, 2002
Rick Giombetti
Glaxo Raises White Flag
in Paxil Case
Wayne Madsen
Forbidden
Truth
The Press, Bush, Oil
and the Taliban
July 21. 2002
Francis A. Boyle
The Rogue Elephant
Jennifer Harbury
Why are
the FBI & CIA Targeting Me?
Joan Claybrook
Time
for a Special Prosceutor
for Thomas White
Gloria Bergen
The Struggle
of Workers
in Palestine
Dave Marsh
Mr. Big Stuff:
Alan Lomax, Great White Fraud
James T. Phillips
"I'll
Tell You No Lies"
The Human Rubble of War
July 20, 2002
Gavin Keeney
The Grave
New Urbanism
World Trade Center Burlesque
Jacob Levich
"I
Was Schooled in Hate"
Confessions of a
Summer Camp Terror Tot
Thomas Croft
Augusta,
GA
Growing Up in the Deep South
Alexander Cockburn
The
Market Hogwallow:
Popgun Populism Isn't Enough
July 19, 2002
Abe Bonowitz / SueZann
Bosler
A Discussion
with Jeb Bush on the Death Penalty
Jonathan Power
No Need
for War Against Iraq
Rick Giombetti
Qwest
Death Watch
Kurt Nimmo
Of Mice,
Bullets & Bombs
M. Shahid Alam
Through
Racist Eyes:
Is Eurocentrism Unique?
July 18, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
Business
As Usual
Jerre Skog
I Spy: Now
Let's be Fair,
the USA Ain't East Germany
Ralph Nader
The CEO
Crimewave:
Corporate Socialism
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
The Rising Tensions
Between Spain and Morocco
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel
and Squawk:
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save the White House?
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July
30, 2002
Resistance
is Allegiance
Discourse and War in Colombia
by Philip Cryan
Last week, Carlos Castaño, longtime leader
of the AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), announced
that the group was disbanding. For years the AUC has united the
many local rightwing paramilitary groups in Colombia within a
single federation.
The previous week, Colombia's largest
newspaper ("El Tiempo") and major television news programs
provided extensive coverage of civilian resistance to a FARC
(Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the country's largest
guerrilla group) takeover in Toribio, a small town in the southwestern
Colombian province of Cauca. The news sources claim that the
people of Toribio have provided a new model for Colombians to
emulate in supporting the government's counter-guerrilla war,
by standing up to the FARC, who had threatened to execute members
of the defeated local police.
On August 7, Alvaro Uribe Velez will
be sworn in as the next president of Colombia. Uribe's foremost
campaign promise was an intensification of the counter-guerrilla
or "counter-terrorist," as it's now of course
invariably called campaign: a decisive re-ordering of the
balance of power between the government and the FARC, achieved
militarily. In addition, Uribe has proposed the establishment
of a network of "a million friends" one million
Colombian civilians enlisted as "eyes and ears" for
the military's campaign against the guerrillas. Though strongly
criticized by Colombian social organizations of all kinds, this
proposal has not met with the kind of general aversion to which
President Bush's similar proposal ("TIPS") was recently
thankfully subjected.
These three issues the AUC's announced
dissolution, the Colombian media's reverential coverage of a
new form of "civil resistance" to the guerrillas, and
Uribe's campaign promises seem to me deeply related ("deep"
in the sense of fundamental but also in the sense of tectonic,
below the surface, their conflagrations not yet visible). I will
try to lay out some of these subterranean relationships, acknowledging
that at this early stage such an analysis can only be speculative.
First: the cooptation of civil resistance
("resistencia civil"). Until a couple weeks ago, "resistencia
civil" meant popular resistance to all of Colombia's armed
actors, a nonviolent opposition (often led, as was the case in
Toribio, by indigenous communities) to the AUC, the FARC and
ELN (National Liberation Army) guerrillas, and the Colombian
State security forces (military and police). The first transformation
carried out by media coverage of and Colombian government officials'
statements about Toribio was to shift the meaning of "civil
resistance" from "resistance to all armed actors"
to "resistance to the guerrillas." CRIC (Regional Indigenous
Council of Cauca, the largest indigenous coalition in the province)
leaders insist that the actions of the people of Toribio in fact
were driven by a principled opposition to all armed actors, yet
media coverage and government statements consistently portrayed
those actions as opposition solely to the FARC.
The second transformation was to make
"resistencia civil" mean active support of the Colombian
State security forces. The actions of the people of Toribio were
reframed as spirited defense of the police and State. This new
model has been offered by the media and government for the emulation
of the Colombian populace in general: stand up for the State
and against the guerrillas. While anchormen discuss "civil
resistance," images of police and military forces flash
across the television screen. An impressively executed rhetorical
coup. When I recently visited a Colombian Army battalion in Popayan
(the capital of Cauca province) they had a newspaper article
about civilian support for the military, titled "La resistencia
civil," tacked up on the wall at the entrance.
The second element is the announcement
by Carlos Castaño, the longtime leader of the AUC paramilitary
federation (which is responsible for over 70% of the civilian
deaths in Colombia's conflict), of its dissolution. His stated
reasons for pulling out of the federation were, basically, 1)
that he disapproves of many members' heavy involvement in drug
trafficking, and 2) that he disapproves of the judgment and actions
of some members in carrying out assassinations and kidnappings.
There are many things to say about this
announcement. First, it is entirely unknowable at present whether
or not the dissolution actually happened, whether this is their
spin on an actual schism in the federation or whether it is pure
p.r. It will probably be a while before anyone knows which of
these is the case. Either way, Castaño's "casting
out the bad seeds" and distancing himself (and the regional
paramilitary group to which he has now returned) from drug trafficking
clearly serves strategically in a broader project of legitimization.
Bringing in the third element, Castaño's
announcement prepares the ground for this legitimization process
under Uribe, who takes office in little more than a week. In
addition, it creates space for the U.S. government to rethink
its stated opposition to the paramilitaries, since now some of
them will supposedly be 'clean' (having 'purged the bad elements')
and potentially legitimate in the eyes of the new Colombian administration.
This despite the fact that Castaño and the other 'clean'
defectors have been involved in a mind-boggling series of brutal
massacres, torture, death threats, and a host of different forms
of social control and repression for more than a decade (all
amply documented in Castaño's memoirs). Crucial to this
courting of U.S. government approval is Castaño's moralizing
condemnation of the great Satan of drug trafficking.
The move also coincides happily with
the U.S. Congress's first-ever approval of aid to create a Colombian
military battalion charged specifically with fighting the paramilitaries.
U.S. military aid in general is to be used against State Department-designated
"Foreign Terrorist Organizations" the FARC, the
ELN, and the AUC. Now that they are no longer the AUC, are the
paramilitaries an approved target of U.S. military aid?
The key to linking this move towards
legitimacy by the paramilitaries with the cooptation of "civil
resistance" and with Uribe's proposed "million friends"
program is a study published last summer by the RAND Corporation,
a U.S. think-tank. The study, called "The Colombian Labyrinth,"
offered advice to the U.S. government in its ongoing support
of the Colombian military. Even before September 11th in
the days when the U.S. Congress and Bush administration disavowed
any interest in Colombia beyond the Drug War the RAND study
argued that establishment of stability and "peace"
in Colombia would require much more than crop-dusters to spray
coca fields. The RAND study's analysis brings the various recent
developments in Colombia together in a neat and carefully-constructed
package:
Realistically, because the paramilitaries
are the product of an environment of insecurity, they will continue
to be a factor in Colombia's crisis as long as the conditions
that gave rise to them are not changed. An alternative approach
could be to establish a network of government-supervised self-defense
organizations. Legalized self-defense units could at least give
the central government more control over their activities, and
possibly improve the prospects for peace by empowering local
communities to provide for their own security.
So this, it seems, is where Colombia
may well be headed. "Civil resistance" will mean "legalized
self-defense units" legitimized by the new government
groups which, like the current paramilitaries, will actively
support the Colombian military. As in the 1980s and early 1990s,
collusion between the government and these "self-defense
units" will not be disguised. And civilians will be enlisted
if not as soldiers, then as informants and supporters
in this project, queerly called "resistance."
Such a world we live in, no? The Gap
sprays graffiti on its own store-windows; the Colombian military's
dirty work outsourcer re-outsources its dirty work. A nonviolent
stance becomes active support for war.
Resistance is allegiance; and war is
peace.
Phillip Cryan
lives in Bogotá, Colombia. His essay "Defining Terrorism,"
first published by Counterpunch, is included in Shattered Illusions,
a collection of essays on post-September 11th politics, now available
from Amal Press. He can be reached at: phillipcryan000@yahoo.com
Today's Features
Tom Stephens
Fast
Track and the
Hypocrites of the House
Linda Belanger
Why Do They Do It?
Alfredo Castro
Colombia's
Disappeared
Anne Brodsky
Inside Pakistan and
Afghanistan with RAWA
Andrew George
The Fires
of Summer:
Don't Blame the Greens
David Vest
A Blind Mule and
a Box of Medals
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