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May 10, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Snitch Envy: Hitchens, Brock and
Whitaker Chambers
John Jonik
Tobacco
and Teens: Criminalizing the Victiims
Vijay Prashad
Fettered Histories:
Tariq Ali and Ahmed Rashid
on Islam
Bill Christison
A
Former CIA Analyst Details
The Disastrous Foreign
Policies of the United States
Omar Barghouti
Israel's Best Interest
May 9, 2002
Alex Lynch
American
Mainstream Media:
Institutionalized Subjectivity
Alexander Cockburn
The Armey Plan:
Palestine to Ft. Worth?
May 8, 2002
James
Masterson
Hysteria
and Panic
About France
Robert Fisk
The Solution to this Filthy War: Foreign
Occupation
Edward
Hammond
and Jan van Aken
Pentagon
Pushed for Offensive BioWeapons Development
David Vest
From Ground Zero to the Bronx
May 7, 2002
Patrick
Cockburn
Bone
Apart:
The Graveyard of Napoleon's Defeated Army
Philip
Farruggio
Muffler
Shop Medicine
Norman
Madarasz
French
Elections:
Pandora's Ballot
Tom Turnipseed
A Travesty of Justice
May 6, 2002
Fran Schor
Invasion
of Iraq:
Coming Soon
Dave Marsh
Love Hurts
John Chuckman
The
Paradoxes of Israel
Rep. Ron Paul
End Corporate Welfare, Pull
the Plug on the Ex-Im Bank
Hussein
Ibish
Devastation
Only Feeds Resistance to Israeli Rule
May 5, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
High and Dry in the Mojave
May 4, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Sharon
the Merciless
and Arafat the Corrupt
Sam Bahour
New United States of Israel
Alexander
Cockburn
Extreme
Solutions:
Priests and Palestinians
Resources:
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
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May
12, 2002
Aiding Colombia
by John Patrick Leary
History is repeating itself in Latin America,
where an American administration is once again becoming involved
in a decades-old civil war. The conflict this time is Colombia's;
and if the U.S. government's recent performance during the Venezuelan
coup is any indication, its policy is certainly a farce.
Last week, the State Department gave
the Colombian army the official human-rights certification needed
to free up tens of millions of dollars in military aid. In Colombia,
leftist guerrillas are battling the Colombian military and a
right-wing paramilitary organization, the United Self-Defense
Forces of Colombia (AUC), whose close ties to the army and the
Colombian business elite are well-known, even in Washington.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the AUC
are implicated in assassinations, kidnappings, and drug trafficking,
though the AUC are by all reports worse on all counts. The smaller
leftwing National Liberation Army (ELN) have also been implicated
in abductions and political killings. Otto Reich, America's Assistant
Secretary of State for Latin America, called last month for increased
military aid to Colombia, arguing that its much- maligned military
has made progress towards improving its record. "Our human-rights
message is making a difference," Reich claimed. However,
according to American and Colombian rights groups, the message
hasn't gotten though.
The five-year "Plan Colombia,"
signed two years ago by President Bill Clinton, was intended
to target coca production in the country to reduce cocaine traffic
and compromise an important source of income for criminal cartels,
guerrillas, and the paramilitaries. U.S. military aid to the
country has been restricted to counter-narcotics assistance,
however; that is, training, weapons, and equipment are to be
used only in the anti-drug campaign, not military operations.
The Bush administration, however, is now pushing Congress to
officially remove these restrictions on military aid to the nation.
As early as 1997, senior U.S. officials like Barry McCaffrey,
Clinton's drug czar, were already contending_to the fury of their
superiors then_that the drug interdiction and the counterinsurgency
effort were indistinguishable. Now, however, that claim is practically
gospel on the U.S. right, as Colombian and American leaders clamor
for concerted U.S. involvement in the war against "narco-terrorism."
The Bush administration does include
many high-ranking officials from the period when the U.S. directly
inserted itself, with disastrous results, into Central America's
civil wars and revolutions. Reich, Elliot Abrams, John Negroponte,
and John Poindexter among others, all helped direct Ronald Reagan's
Latin American policy, and all were implicated in the Iran-Contra
scandal that nearly brought down the administration. And while
the language may have changed_"terrorism," not Cuban-Soviet
communism, is the specter that now haunts Latin America_the repertoire
of the Colombian counterinsurgency is all too familiar. Political
murders like the shooting of a Catholic archbishop in Cali (he
was a sharp critic of the paramilitaries, guerrillas, and the
government, and his death remains a mystery), and the mass killings
and disappearances of peasants, trade unionists, human rights
activists, leftists, and anyone suspected of sympathizing with
these have characterized the conflict, which has exhibited marked
similarities with the political violence that tore apart El Salvador,
Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica twenty years ago.
Colombia has not yet sounded those depths,
but it is getting close. Then as now, "human rights"
were meant to be a condition of U.S. aid, but again appear to
be little more than a public-relations shibboleth in the ever-deepening
Colombian quagmire. In his aid plea last month, Reich outlined
both the "narco-terrorist" threat and the Colombian
and American governments' joint commitment to human rights. In
fact, Reich went on, "two senior officials traveled to Bogota
late last month to underscore the importance we attach to human
rights." The military itself is not directly responsible
for many of the country's political killings_a fact proudly pointed
out by the State Department_which are instead committed by guerrillas
and, in 75% of the cases, the paramilitaries who operate with
the compliance and often the assistance of the armed forces.
In 1997, a declassified CIA report noted, "We see scant
indications that the military is making an effort to directly
confront the paramilitary groups," but with last week's
certification, the U.S. government now reasons that the armed
forces are breaking their paramilitary links.
Human Rights Watch, on the other hand,
reported that a systematic pattern of collaboration with the
AUC continues in the Colombian armed forces, and says there is
still "no credible evidence" that the government or
army have taken action against death-squad sympathizers in its
ranks. "The Colombian government's progress against paramilitary
groups," the report asserts, "has amounted to little
more than rhetoric, unsupported by actions in the field designed
either to break existing ties between the military and paramilitary
groups, prosecute the officers who support these links, or pursue
those groups and their leaders effectively in the field."
Nevertheless, it is rhetoric that impresses
an American public and government eager to see easy results in
Colombia, a nation that has been torn by violence and severe
underdevelopment for generations. The real targets of U.S. and
Colombian policymakers are, of course, the FARC and the ELN.
While the AUC is also listed as a "terrorist organization"
by the State Department, U.S. officials have proven unable to
grasp either the immensity of its crimes or the complexity of
the country's civil war, now crudely shoehorned into the Bush
"war on terror." And while Colombia is nominally a
democracy, its government is riven with corruption and patronage,
and many honest officials are paralyzed by fear of retaliation
from the military, the AUC, or the guerrillas. In making a case
for the newly reformed Colombian military, Reich cited the arrests
of some paramilitary leaders and the recent punishment of Navy
General Rodrigo Quinones, the figure to whom Reich was apparently
referring when he noted that a "senior Colombian naval official's
career was recently ended because of allegations that he collaborated
with paramilitaries." Quinones was in fact promoted twice
after Colombian government investigators linked him to at least
fifty-seven murders of trade unionists, human rights workers,
and community leaders in 1991 and 1992. Government investigators
also determined that the general gave safe passage to AUC death
squads who executed 26 people with sledgehammers in the village
of Chengue. Despite what Reich says, however, Quinones has not
recently been punished, as if a career change could be considered
punishment. He has simply been reassigned as a military attache
abroad.
The State Department's obstinate interest
in purely symbolic actions like the reassignment of Quinones
is hardly surprising to those who remember the Reagan administration's
almost surreal capacity to detect "progress" in the
behavior of the Contras and the Central American military juntas_even
when that progress consisted of, as it once did in El Salvador,
of renaming a death squad, just to say in a human-rights report
that it no longer existed. The absurd_in the literary sense_belief
that a thing can be brought into being simply by naming it, that
democracy can be conjured out of ballot boxes, press releases,
and a well-articulated "human rights message," continues
in the Bush administration. Reagan once described Guatemalan
General Efrain Rios Montt, whose dictatorship killed at least
15,000 innocent people in its own campaign against guerrillas,
as "totally committed to democracy," a claim that flew
in the face of every available fact about the man. Reich himself
listed several "human rights programs" sponsored by
millions of U.S. aid dollars_but none of these programs appear
to be devoted to reforming the Colombian military and punishing
its rights abusers, addressing the extreme poverty in the countryside,
or successfully breaking the Colombian farmer's dependence on
the coca crop with sustainable alternative development. Simply
throwing military aid at political problems will not by itself
bring peace or equity_especially when the recipients of that
aid are the problem. This is a lesson the U.S. should have learned.
It is mistake America appears prepared to repeat.
John Patrick Leary is an activist and writer in New York City.
E-mail: johnpatrickleary@yahoo.com
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