The War Criminal and the Whore
Barry McCaffrey and
Jose Miguel Vivanco
No sane person believes
in the "war on drugs" any more. This implies of course
that our nation's affairs are being directed by madmen, but you
knew that anyway. Besides, there are signs that sanity may be
seeping slowly through the halls of Congress. Three times the
Clinton-Gore administration has tried to push through a billion-plus
aid package for the Colombian military and security forces. Twice
Congress has rejected the White House request. At the start of
this week reports from the battlefield suggest that there's more
than an even chance the senate may once again deliver a rebuff
to White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey.
McCaffrey, accused last week by Seymour Hersh
in the New Yorker of having been involved in war crimes in 1991
at the end of the war in Iraq, has been the most conspicuous
advocate for deepening US military involvement in Colombia. In
his comic-book scenario, the cocaine and opium that undermines
America is being cultivated by Colombian peasants under the supervision
of communist narco-traffickers, who use their drug profits to
buy guns to undermine Colombia's government. Send down money
and advisers to the Colombian security forces to wipe out the
guerillas and the drug war will be won.
No surprises here, since McCaffrey used to
head US Southern Military Command, which has a prodigious institutional
self-interest in the drug war, since it provides a nice updated
rationale for the old, old business of counter-insurgency.
McCaffrey and his prime ally in the House,
Rep Ben Gilman of New York, prepared themselves for the obvious
objections to the comic-book scenario, which are that the Colombian
military is run by criminal torturers either identical to, or
closely allied with the drug Mafias; that years of "drug
interdiction" have never had the slightest impact on shipments
of cocaine and heroin to the US; and that demands for $1.7 billion
in military aid would be followed by further demands, then by
requests for a bigger commitment of military forces and then,
all of a sudden and without having noticed, we'd be right there
in the middle of another quagmire.
Those with memories
stretching back to the 1980s might note a certain resemblance
between the fight over Colombian aid and the fight about aid
to the Nicaraguan contras and to the government of El Salvador.
Back then, there were similar protests about sending money to
the butchers who murdered Archbishop Romero as he preached in
his cathedral in San Salvador, or to the drug-running contras.
The US Congress rebuffed Reagan's request for direct military
assistance to the Contras, thus prompting the illegal supply
line supervised by Col. Oliver North. Meanwhile, the Reagan White
House issued glowing reports about amazing progress in imparting
a profound respect for human rights in the minds of Salvadoran
officers best noted for the courage with which they ordered the
rape and murder of nuns and unarmed peasants.
The strategies are unchanged. McCaffrey has
been strenuously wooing human rights groups. So close have been
the contacts that amid McCaffrey's strenuous efforts to counteract
Hersh's New Yorker article, the deputy general counsel and human
rights officer at McCaffrey's Office of National Drug Control
Policy sent a fax to six human rights activists, asking them
to help "discredit the Hersh article from your perspective".
Of course this fax from David Shull was speedily leaked, causing
people to ponder why Shull should have assumed that he might
get support fronm human rights activists in protecting a possible
war criminal.
It's clear that some groups would have nothing
to do with Shull's invitation. Carlos Salinas of Amnesty International
told AP, after Shull's bizarre fax had been made public, that
appeared that Amnesty International was being asked to help bury
a story and that "it's one thing to refute charges or refute
informationquite another to ask for participation in a preemptive
strike to discredit." But Shull was probably quite correct
in assuming his fax might get a friendlier reception at another
human rights organization, namely Human Rights Watch.
On May 18 Salon, the
online mag, published a hero-worshipping piece by Ana Arana about
Jose Miguel Vivanco, a Chilean-born, Harvard-educated lawyer
who heads Human Rights Watch Americas. In tones breathless with
naïve admiration Arana described how Vivanco had concluded
that McCaffrey's $1.7 billion aid package was bound to clear
Congress and that outright opposition was useless. The only strategy,
according to Vivanco, was to install in the bill language ensuring
that the Colombian military would be forced to respect human
rights. Already, Vivanco told Arana, the Colombian military have
cleaned up their act and are responsible for only 2 per cent
of all human rights violations.
"If Human Rights Watch has its way,"
Arana wrote in her Salon piece, "the new bill will clearly
call for an end to all connections between paramilitary groups
and some sectors of the Colombian armed forces." This Salon-sponsored
drivel meandered on past all the familiar verbal landmarks, the
"difficult middle course" being steered by Vivanco,
the necessity for pragmatism in "balancing politics in Washington
with the realities of the Colombian conflict."
Back in the 1980s there were people just like Vivanco making
the same strenuous claims about new found respect for human rights
in the Salvadoran forces. The claims mounted in lockstep with
reports of killings by death squads and paramilitaries. Year
after year the US press here mostly went along with the charade
that these death squads were somehow beyond the control of Salvadoran
military or intelligence.
The fact that Human Rights Watch should lend
itself vigorously to the effort to push the military aid package
through Congress is bad enough. What makes it even worse and
even more stupid is the fact that the premise of Vivanco's "pragmatism"
is nonsense. The $1.7 billion package is not a done deal. Congress
may either seriously amend it, and the Senate may yet sink it
altogether.
Sanho Tree, who directs the Drug Policy Project
for the Institute for Policy Project tells me that as of the
start of this week the Senate could reject its version of the
House aid package that unexpectedly draw 183 votes in opposition.
This would make it the third rejection of Colombian military
aid. Last year's package was stopped by Republican Trent Lott
on procedural grounds. Earlier this spring a House version got
so laden with billions in pork that the Senate threw it out.
And now the Senate has already cut the appropriation down to
$1 billion, with serious amendments by Senators Paul Wellstone
and Arlen Specter further cutting it and one by Leahy maybe sinking
it once again.
The friendly reception
of Wellstone's amendment shows which way the wind is blowing
on the Hill, as regards the War on Drugs. The Minnesota liberal
is proposing to transfer $225 million in the package from its
present proclaimed purpose of financing an attack by the Colombian
military on guerilla strongholds in southern Colombia. Instead,
the $225 million would go into drug treatment programs here in
the US. Arlen Specter is expected to offer a more drastic version
of the same idea.
No legislator, particularly one in an election
year, likes to be caught out on a limb, charged by opponents
with somehow being soft on drugs. But amid the obvious realities
of a war on drugs that's gone nowhere, legislators are happy
to be given ammunition allowing them to say that the money is
being spent unwisely. One such piece of ammunition Tree and others
have been circulating is a study by the Santa Monica-based Rand
think-tank of cocaine markets. The study found that provision
of treatment to cocaine users is ten times more cost effective
than drug interdiction schemes, and 23 times more cost effective
than eradication of coca at its source. Yet one half of adults
in immediate need of treatment are not receiving it, and many
treatment programs have long waiting lines. The easiest place
for poor people to get treatment remains prison, which is also
one of the easiest places to get drugs.
If the McCaffrey package prevails, it's easy
enough to predict what will happen, because it's happening already
anyway. US dollars, personnel and equipment will flow south.
There will be reports of a spirit of confidence in the Colombian
military. People like Vivanco and unscrupulous outfits like Human
Rights Watch will testifying glowingly to great progress in imparting
respect for human rights in the Colombian police and military.
The killings of labor organizers, peasant leaders, church workers
and any other threat to the right wing drug lords in Colombia
will go on, done by the paramilitary death squads supervised
by the army and the drug lords (very often identical) with extra
direction from the CIA.
If the McCaffrey package
is beaten back yet again, it will a heartening sign similar to
those heartening signs in the early eighties when Congress tried
to kill aid to the contras: that our national affairs are not
entirely run by madmen. We don't need to be fighting a decade
long counter-insurgency war in Colombia. Colombia needs loans
and capital investment. It doesn't need McCaffrey's legions,
any more than its farmers need the bio-viruses McCaffrey has
also unleashed upon them.
Now, do your bit, and call your senators today,
and urge them to reject the McCaffrey package. CP
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