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The
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August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
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Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
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Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
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Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
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Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
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The Intelligence Squad
August 20, 2003
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Life and Death on the Frontlines of Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
UN Bombing: Act of Terrorism or Guerrilla War?
Michael Egan
Revisiting the Paranoid Style in the Dark
Ramzi Kysia
Peace
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NPR and the NAFTA Highway
John L. Hess
A Downside Day
Edward Said
The Imperial Bluster of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Gridlock at Path 15: the California Blackouts were the "Wake
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Ashcroft's Patriotic Hype
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Blackouts Happen
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"Our Patch": Australia v. the Evil Doers of the South
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Sean Donahue
Uribe's Cruel Model: Colombia Moves Toward Totalitarianism
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Bush's Credibility Problem on Missile Defense
Juliana Fredman
Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna
John Ross
Fox Government's Attack on Mexican Basques
Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn't Say
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Tom Delay's Dual Loyalities
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Hero in War and Peace
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Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the Hudson
Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power (Companies)!
Jason Leopold
The California Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay
Matt Siegfried
The Bush Administration in Context
Elaine Cassel
At Last, A Judge Who Acts Like a Judge
Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's War
Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Blackout Pete Wilson
Website of the Day
Fire Griles!
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
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War Pimps
Saul Landau
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Brian Cloughley
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William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
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Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
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Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
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August
23, 2003
Rumsfeld Does Bogota
Right
Turns in South America?
By FORREST HYLTON
Helicopters circling the city, combat
planes roaring overhead; the streets, airports and public buildings
patrolled by 13,000 police, soldiers, secret servicemen and spies,
U.S. as well as Colombian.
The arrival of Donald Rumsfeld in Bogotá
on August 19 did not portend anything but the further ratcheting
up of imperial terror in South America. The day before, Colombian
President Álvaro Uribe faced machine-gun fire from the
FARC (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces) when his helicopter
approached Granada, Antioquia, a town that was destroyed by the
FARC's gas cylinder bombs on December 6-7, 2000. Since the FARC
have sophisticated, up-to-date grenade launchers as well as machine
guns and crude cylinder bombs, one wonders if, like nearly everything
else in Álvaro Uribe's presidency, the attack was not
stage-managed to drive home the need for more resources to fight
"drugs and terror," so as to wipe out the FARC guerrillas,
now held to be responsible for the country's accumulated problems.
For the past several years, South America's
non-violent social movements-the Argentine piqueteros, the Brazilian
landless, the Ecuadorian indigenous people, the Bolivian coca
growers, Colombian and Peruvian trade unionists and community
organizations-have offered a beacon of hope to the world, since
they have blocked a series of neoliberal privatization efforts
in the cities and held counterinsurgency in check in the countryside.
As recently as nine months ago, there were reasons for relative
optimism, since the movements had translated mass mobilization
into electoral power: Lula and the PT had won in Brazil, Evo
Morales and MAS had lost the Bolivian presidency by less than
1.5% but promised to form a formidable opposition, Lucio Gutierrez
was going to have indigenous leaders in his government in Ecuador,
Chávez was close to defeating the opposition in Venezuela.
Beginning with Plan Colombia, in the
name of the war on drugs-which, after September 11, 2001, became
the war on drugs and terror-the U.S. government responded to
the growing challenge to the Washington Consensus: a military
base in Manta, Ecuador, 'Plan Dignity' to eradicate coca in the
Bolivian Chapare, a coup in Venezuela, offhand comments from
U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill that rocked Brazilian financial
markets as elections neared. But the cornerstone of the U.S.
approach to the hemisphere was to be found in Colombia, the world's
third most-important client-state after Israel and Egypt ($3
billion paid out since 2000). In late July 2003, the U.S. House
of Representatives approved $731 million in FY 2004 for the Andean
Regional Initiative (explicitly acknowledged as the continuation
of Plan Colombia, under new auspices), two thirds of which will
go to the Colombian government; more specifically, to its military
and police.
Though the conjuncture remains fluid,
hence subject to dramatic reversal, it seems that for the time
being, the imperially aligned right has regained the upper hand
everywhere in Latin America except Venezuela and Cuba. At the
inauguration ceremony of President Nicanor Duarte in Paraguay
on August 15, on the initiative of Álvaro Uribe, presidents
of the South American republics-excepting Hugo Chávez-signed
the "Declaration of Asunción," a pledge of loyalty
in "the war on drugs and terror."
In effect, Lula has complied with his
campaign pledge to meet IMF terms of fiscal austerity and
renounced an independent foreign policy of the sort that Chávez
has tried to forge (so far without success). Lula's diplomatic
profile was conspicuously low during Gulf War: The Sequel,
and the signing of the "Declaration of Asunción"
is nothing short of outright capitulation to U.S. foreign policy
aims. Without Brazilian leadership in foreign and economic policy,
smaller, less independent countries of the continent have scant
room for maneuver. Like Lula, Lucio Gutierrez has recently risen
to the top of the U.S. rankings of South American presidents,
and he, too, signed Uribe's pledge of allegiance. But he faces
imminent confrontation at home with the very indigenous and urban
popular forces that brought him to power, and may not last long.
If he is overthrown, he would become the third Ecuadorian ruler
to be deposed since 1999.
Lula, whose administration appears to
be more stable than all others save Uribe's, recently promised
the MST he would use state power and resources to confront and
overcome landlord resistance to agrarian reform. He would do
well to keep his promise, since the landlords are politically
isolated and, lacking close ties to financial and multinational
enterprise, economically marginal relative to other fractions
of the Brazilian ruling class. Their armed wing, responsible
for the deaths of forty-three peasants in the past year, would
be no match for the Brazilian army, as it lacks political legitimacy
in the cities, where sympathy runs high for the MST's legalist
strategy and tactics of direct action. By implementing agrarian
reform, Lula could avoid confrontation with the continent's most
powerful social movement without having to deliver anything but
IMF recipes to his urban, working-class constituents.
Of course Colombia contrasts sharply
with Brazil. Uribe represents a politically ascendant, landed
fraction of the ruling class invested in extensive cattle ranching
and narco-financed, paramilitary counterinsurgency. Though the
AUC paramilitaries have been on the U.S. State Department's list
of terrorist groups since September 10, 2001, Uribe officially
began a "peace" process with them last month; U.S.
Embassy Political Officer Alexander Lee, and Stewart Tuttle,
head of the Human Rights Section, met in secret with AUC representatives
in early May. The U.S. government has since proposed to spend
$3 million to "disarm and demobilize" the 13,000 AUC
fighters under the control of Carlos Castaño and Salvatore
Mancuso. Mancuso-who, along with Castaño, has been convicted
in absentia for war crimes and is wanted for extradition on charges
of smuggling 17 tons of cocaine into the U.S.-has said that since
it is politically willing to try to eliminate the guerrillas,
Uribe's government has made the paramilitaries irrelevant.
A proposed bill-supplementary to a proposed
referendum that would amnesty the paramilitaries-would allow
paramilitaries to avoid prison by paying indemnities to families
of people they massacred or murdered; or, in some cases, through
public service. If sworn into law, the proposal would reinforce
impunity in a country where 95 per cent of homicides go unpunished.
And people like Castaño and Mancuso would become Senators
or deputies in Congress, while their foot soldiers become government
spies or "peasant militiamen and women."
Meanwhile, teachers and other trade unionists,
community leaders, human rights workers, independent journalists
and academics; petty drug dealers and consumers, the homeless,
transvestites, homosexuals, addicts and street kids; all are
being murdered, though in much smaller numbers than peasants.
The six Afro-Colombians murdered outside Buenaventura by the
AUC in early July, for example.
Or the four young Guajibo women, one
of whom had her fetus hacked out of her stomach and thrown into
the nearby river, raped and killed in the Betoyes reserve in
Arauca in May. The perpetrators, according to Guajibo survivors,
were soldiers from the 18th Brigade's Navos Pardos Battalion,
wearing AUC armbands and coordinating with the ACC, a "dissident"
paramilitary block that has opted out of "peace negotiations"
with Uribe.
As for making peace with the FARC, "if
they break the will of these rebel groups, that's when negotiations
will work," a Colombian military official told Jim Garamone
of the American Forces Press Service.
Uribe's imperial backing is nearly unlimited,
as demonstrated by Rumsfeld's visit, as well as visits from Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, on August 11,
and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick on August 8. Myers
declared that Uribe had achieved significant victories (shades
of Vietnam?), compared Venezuela to Syria, and called Colombia
a "staunch ally" in the war on drugs and terror, indicating
very clearly the Pentagon's vision of foreign policy for the
region. For his part, Zoellick promised Uribe that Colombia
was next in line for a bi-lateral trade agreement similar to
the one the Bush administration recently reached with Chile.
The message to the rest of Latin American rulers was simple:
follow Uribe and you will be rewarded.
In Bolivia, it is evident that Gonzalo
Sánchez de Lozada, perhaps the shakiest of South American
presidents, has adopted a rigid posture on Uribe's end of the
political spectrum, reciting neoliberal mantras, claiming that
the armed forces represent "the pillar of democracy,"
and re-appointing Carlos Sánchez Berzaín-whose
face, more than any other, is associated with the counterinsurgent
violence of February 12-13-as Minister of Defense. Though Uribe
has not gone along with the frame-up of Colombian peasant leader
Francisco "Pacho" Cortés in Bolivia, Pacho's
case is nevertheless in keeping with the Uribista strategy, which
creates bogus links between social protest, terrorism and drug
trafficking; links that conveniently obscure systematic, high-level
connections between drug trafficking and the political right
in order to curry favor with the U.S. government.
Though the right may have re-taken the
political initiative in South America for now, it remains to
be seen whether its narrow and unimaginative vision can be imposed
on Bolivia, much less the rest of a continent whose peoples have
proven most resistant to the long night of the neoliberal reich.
Forrest Hylton
is conducting doctoral research in history in Bolivia. A Spanish
version of this story originally appeared in Pulso, a Bolivian
newsweekly. The September issue of New
Left Review features a story by Hylton on Colombia: 'An
Evil Hour': Uribe's Colombia in Historical Context." He
can be reached at: forresthylton@hotmail.com.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
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