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Five Days That Shook The World:
The Battle for Seattle
and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
with Photos
by Allan Sekula
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Published on January 15
BUSH PUTSCH
OKAYED
BY SENATE DEMS AND
BLESSED BY SUPREMES
More Scandals
of Squelched
Black Votes
Outside Florida
COUNTERPUNCH
SERIES
ON BUSH/CHENEY
CABINET CONTINUES
Nixon Protege Rumsfled
Returns
to Pentagon as
the Keeper of
the Trough
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Russia Nukes Itself
Deregulation in
Airlines and Energy
Published on January 5
MEET GALE NORTON
She Sought Out
James Watt, Was
Enthralled by Ayn
Rand, Did Battle
Against Gays, For
Big Tobacco, Wanted
To Trash Endangered
Species Act, Now
To Head Interior
MUZZLING WHISTLEBLOWERS
EPA Cracks Down
On Hugh Kaufman
For Telling the Truth
About Browner and
Al Gore
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Jesse Jackson
Takes a Dive
Hate Crimes and
Behavior Modification
in Albuquerque
Published on December 5
VOTING WHILE
BLACK
How Florida Kept
More than 100,000
Blacks and Other
Minorities From
Voting
CRIMINALIZING
YOUTH
The Unrelenting
War Against
America's Teens
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Kathryn, Dubya
and Jeb
Al Gore Disses
His Secret Service
Agents
Search CounterPunch
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore: a User's Manual
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the Press
by Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
New Stories:
CounterPunch Coverage
of Election 2000
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January 30, 2001
TR, Colin
Powell and Plan Colombia
From San Juan Hill
to Chengue
What
else did Bill Clinton do in those final hours of his presidency?
Let's see, he gave Teddy Roosevelt the Medal of Honor and boasted
in the accompanying speech on January 16 that in 1993 he'd broken
with the usual policy of incoming Democratic Presidents, who
would pull the portrait of TR off the wall above the mantelpiece
in the White House's Roosevelt Room and put up FDR instead. Then
the incoming Republican Commander in Chief would reverse the
process. Not our Bill. He kept TR up on the wall, triangulating
right from the start. On January 16 Bill said it was high time
to give TR the medal for which he had been recommended right
after the charge up San Juan Hill. Exit Bill, enter the new team,
including Secretary of State Colin Powell, who now has a chance
to live up to those fine words of his to the Republicans massed
in Philadelphia for their convention last August. Powell told
the plump delegates they should not forget the poor and the afflicted.
How might Powell distinguish
himself from his predecessor Madeleine Albright? The latter's
final act in office was, with the approval of Clinton, to insist
that a slab of US military aid to Colombia should not be held
up out of any pettifogging concerns for human rights. The Colombian
military and its death squads have a documented record for bestial
carnage unrivaled in the entire world, and so, in admiration
for this pre-eminence, last August Clinton waived four of the
five human rights criteria laid out by Congress to release the
first chunk of $781.5 million. A certification or waiver was
also required for the second installment, of $56.4 million. While
conceding that the record of the Colombian military was not all
that it could be, the Clinton Administration nonetheless decided
that because the second slice of aid was not included in "regular
funds" but rather in an emergency spending bill, the certification
and waiver process did not apply.
On
January 17, the day after Bill honored the imperialist hero of
the Spanish-American War, and when Albright and the others were
still chortling at their ingenuity in circumventing the human
rights provisions, the BBC's correspondent in Bogotá,
Jeremy McDermott, reported that "alleged right-wing paramilitaries"
had attacked a village on Colombia's northwest coast, killing
twenty-five people. "Fifty men in military uniform arrived
in Chengue in the early hours of the morning," McDermott
told his audience. "They rounded up 25 men whom they accused
of being guerrilla sympathizers and hacked them to death with
machetes. They then set fire to thirty houses of this village
in the northern province of Sucre." McDermott added that
the massacre had all the hallmarks of the Self-Defense Forces
of Colombia, a right-wing paramilitary army of 8,000 fighters
"deeply involved in the drug trade."
For months the inhabitants
of Chengue had a pretty good idea of what might lie in store
for them. On October 6 they wrote a letter to Colombian President
Andrés Pastrana, detailing the threat of violence and
human rights abuses that the people of the Municipal de Ovejas
feel could occur at any moment on the part of paramilitary groups
operating in the region. The terrified townsfolk urged Pastrana
to do something "to avoid a massacre," explaining that
the government's presence was minimal in the area and that the
people live in "anguish and tension" because of the
documented barbarism. Attached to the letter were the signatures
of ninety-nine residents of the town.
While
the villagers were appealing to Pastrana to save their lives,
the Clinton Administration was putting spurs to "Plan Colombia,"
a strategy straight off the Pentagon's Vietnam and Central American
drawing board. Beefed up by US training, "advisers,"
arms and intelligence, the Colombian military has been planning
to overwhelm guerrilla bases in southern Colombia, simultaneously
eradicating the coca and poppy fields, which are the peasants'
only resource, the option of legal crops long since sabotaged
by US economic policies. Pretenses that the Clinton Administration
is strongly supportive of a peaceful solution to Colombia's troubles
has become increasingly ludicrous, as dollars and kindred practical
support for the Colombian military and its death squads have
flooded from Washington to Bogotá.
As a man who started his career
in a counter-insurgency unit in Vietnam, Powell knows all about
such campaigns of pacification. And since he's not dumb, he knows
that Plan Colombia will merely augment that country's misery,
which has more than half the population below poverty level,
internal refugees by the million and no prospects for improvement.
He knows too that "drug interdiction," partly the official
US rationale for Plan Colombia, is a farce. He knows where the
$1.3 billion should have gone: into the drug education and rehab
programs here in the United States. The Clinton Administration
and its Republican allies successfully beat back an effort by
Senator Paul Wellstone to get about $225,000 of the package reserved
to that end.
What's the chance of Powell
pressing for a different approach in Colombia? Zero, probably.
But at least once we should remind him of his rhetoric in Philadelphia,
just as we should remind Bush at least once of his eloquent inaugural
speech about helping the poor. Why collude with these folks in
their degradation of language and morals?
And
Bill? He's in Chappaqua glad-handing the locals and contemplating
the memoirs that will doubtless be as mendacious as those of
Teddy Roosevelt, like Clinton a Force Ten blowhard and self-inflater.
In a couple of weeks Bill will be ogling the girls in the bank
and suggesting sorties to the local hot-mattress motel, if such
sanctuary is available in the purlieus of the Saw Mill River
Parkway. If she's called Gennifer we'll have come back to the
beginning, just as, on the larger canvas, we do year after year
with San Juan Hill. CP
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