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Title: On Colombia Author: Noam Chomsky Date: December 2004 Language: en Topics: Colombia Source: Retrieved on 7th September 2021 from https://chomsky.info/200412__/ Notes: introduction to Doug Stokes America’s Other War: Terrorizing Colombia, Zed
As I write, I have just received the most recent of the regular notices
from the Jesuit-based human rights organization Justicia y Paz in
Bogotà, directed by the courageous priest Father Javier Giraldo, one of
Colombia’s leading defenders of human rights, at great personal risk.
This notice reports the assassination of an Afro-Colombian human rights
activist, Yolanda Cerón Delgado, as she was leaving the pastoral social
office near the police station. Justicia y Paz reports that it is a
typical paramilitary operation, in association with the government
security forces and police. Regrettably, the event is not remarkable.
A few weeks earlier there had been an unusual event: a rare concession
of responsibility. The Colombian attorney general’s office reported that
the army had lied when it claimed that three dead union leaders were
Marxist rebels killed in a firefight. They had, in fact, been
assassinated by the army. Reporting the concession, the New York Times
observes that “Colombia is by far the world’s most dangerous country for
union members, with 94 killed last year and 47 slain by Aug. 25 this
year,” mostly killed “by right-wing paramilitary leaders linked to rogue
army units.” The term “rogue” is interpretation, not description.
The worldwide total of murdered union leaders for 2003 was reported to
be 123, three-quarters of them in Colombia. The proportions have been
consistent for some time. Not only has Colombia been the most dangerous
place for labor leaders anywhere in the world (insofar as statistics are
available), but it has been more dangerous than the rest of the world
combined. To take another year, on Human Rights Day, 10 December 2002,
the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions issued its annual
Survey of Trade Union Rights. It reported that by then over 150 trade
unionists had been murdered in Colombia that year. The final figure for
2002 reported by the International Labor Organization in its 2003 annual
survey was 184 trade unionists assassinated in Colombia, 85% of the
total worldwide in 2002. The figures are similar in other recent years.
The assassinations are attributed primarily to paramilitary or security
forces, a distinction with little apparent difference. Their connections
are so close that Human Rights Watch refers to the paramilitaries as the
“Sixth Division” of the Colombian army, along with its official five
Divisions. As Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other human
rights organizations have documented, political murders in Colombia – of
which assassinations of union activists constitute a small fraction –
are carried out with almost complete impunity. They call for an end to
impunity, and termination of US military aid as long as the atrocities
continue with scarcely a tap on the wrist. The military aid continues to
flow in abundance, with pretexts that are an embarrassment.
It remains to be seen whether the September 2004 concession of the army
murders leads to any action. If the past is a guide, nothing will happen
beyond the lowest levels, though the evidence for higher military and
civilian responsibility is substantial. There have been a few occasions
when major massacres were seriously investigated. The most significant
of these was the Trujillo massacre in 1990, when more than 60 people
were murdered in a particularly brutal army operation, their bodies cut
to pieces with chain saws. Under the initiative of Justicia y Paz, the
Samper government agreed to allow an independent commission of
investigation, including government representatives, which published a
report in shocking detail, identifying the military officer in charge,
Major Alirio Urueña Jaramillo. Ten years later, Father Giraldo reported
that nothing had been done: “Not one of the guilty has been sanctioned,”
he said, “even though many more victims have come to light in subsequent
years.” US military aid not only continued to flow, but was increased.
By the time of the Trujillo massacre Colombia had the worst human rights
record in the hemisphere – not because atrocities in Colombia had
markedly increased, but because atrocities by El Salvador and other US
clients had declined. Colombia became by far the leading recipient of US
military aid and training, replacing El Salvador. By 1999, Colombia
became the leading recipient of US military aid worldwide (excepting
Israel-Egypt, a separate category always), replacing Turkey – not
because atrocities in Colombia had increased, but because Turkish
atrocities had declined. Through the 1990s, Turkey had conducted its
brutal counterinsurgency war against its domestic Kurdish population,
leading to tens of thousands of deaths and probably millions driven from
their devastated villages, many surviving somehow in condemned buildings
in miserable slums in Istanbul, in caves in the walls of the
semi-official Kurdish capital of Diyarbakir, or wherever they can. The
atrocities were accompanied by vicious torture, destruction of lands and
forests, just about any barbaric crime imaginable. Arms from the US came
in an increasing flow, amounting to about 80% of Turkey’s arms. In the
single year 1997, Clinton sent more arms to Turkey than the cumulative
total for the entire Cold War period prior to the onset of the
counterinsurgency campaign. But by 1999, the campaign had achieved
“success,” and Colombia took over first place. It also retains its
position as “by far the biggest humanitarian catastrophe of the Western
hemisphere,” as UN Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland
reiterated at a press conference in New York in May 2004.
There is nothing particularly novel about the relation between atrocious
human rights violations and US aid. On the contrary, it is a rather
consistent correlation. The leading US academic specialist on human
rights in Latin America, Lars Schoultz, found in a 1981 study that US
aid “has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments
which torture their citizens,… to the hemisphere’s relatively egregious
violators of fundamental human rights.” That includes military aid, is
independent of need, and runs through the Carter period. In another
academic study, Latin Americanist Martha Huggins reviewed data for Latin
America suggesting that “the more foreign police aid given [by the US],
the more brutal and less democratic the police institutions and their
governments become.” Economist Edward Herman found the same correlation
between US military aid and state terror worldwide, but also carried out
another study that gave a plausible explanation. US aid, he found,
correlated closely with improvement in the climate for business
operations, as one would expect. And in US dependencies it turns out
with fair regularity, and for understandable reasons, that the climate
for profitable investment and other business operations is improved by
killing union activists, torture and murder of peasants, assassination
of priests and human rights activists, and so on. There is, then, a
secondary correlation between US aid and egregious human rights
violations.
There have been no similar studies since, to my knowledge, presumably
because the conclusions are too obvious to merit close inquiry.
The Latin American Catholic Church became a particular target when the
Bishops adopted the “preferential option for the poor” in the 1960s and
‘70s, and priests, nuns, and lay workers began to establish base
communities were peasants read the Gospels and drew from their teachings
lessons about elementary human rights, and worse yet, even began to
organize to defend their rights. The horrendous Reagan decade,
commemorated with reverence and awe in the United States, is remembered
rather differently in the domains where his administration waged the
“war on terror” that it declared on coming to office in 1981: El
Salvador, for example, where the decade is framed by the assassination
in March 1980 of an Archbishop who had become a “voice for the
voiceless” and the assassination of six leading Latin American
intellectuals, Jesuit priests, in November 1989, by an elite force armed
and trained by the US which had left a shocking trail of blood and
torture in earlier years. The (now renamed) School of the Americas,
which has trains Latin American officers, including some of the
continent’s most outstanding torturers and mass murderers, takes pride
in having helped to “defeat liberation theology,” one of the “talking
points” in its public relations efforts. Such matters arouse little
interest in the West, and are scarcely known apart from specialists and
the solidarity movements. The reaction would be somewhat different if
anything remotely similar had taken place in those years in the domains
of the official enemy.
The basic principles of state terror are explained by Schoultz in a
standard scholarly work on US foreign policy and human rights in Latin
America. Referring to the neo-Nazi “national security states” imposed or
backed by the U.S. from the 1960s, Schoultz observes that the goal of
state terror was “to destroy permanently a perceived threat to the
existing structure of socioeconomic privilege by eliminating the
political participation of the numerical majority…, [the] popular
classes.” All of this is very much in accord with the basic principles
of the Counterinsurgency (CI) doctrines that have been core elements of
U.S. foreign policy since World War II, as Doug Stokes reviews,
doctrines that remain quite consistent while pretexts change, as does
their implementation, as again Stokes reviews in illuminating detail.
Colombia’s rise to first place as a recipient of US military aid in
1999, replacing Turkey, was particularly striking at that particular
moment. The transfer, which passed without notice in the mainstream,
came right in the midst of a chorus of self-adulation among Western
elites and praise for their leaders that may have been without
historical precedent. Respected commentators gazed with awe on “the
idealistic New World bent on ending inhumanity” as it entered a “noble
phase” of its foreign policy with a “saintly glow,” acting from
“altruism” alone and following “principles and values” in a sharp break
from the past history of the world as it led the way to establishing a
“new norm of humanitarian intervention.” The jewel in the diadem,
opening a new era of world history, was the bombing of Serbia in 1999.
Whatever one thinks of the crimes attributed to Serbia in Kosovo prior
to the bombing (which, as anticipated, led to radical escalation of the
crimes), they do not compare with the unnoticed actions of Western
clients, not only the leading recipients of US military aid but others
as well: East Timor to take a striking example from those very months,
while US-UK support continued as atrocities once again escalated well
beyond anything reported at the time in Kosovo by official Western
sources.
As is well-known, the “drug war” provides the recent justification for
support for the security forces and (indirectly) their paramilitary
associates in Colombia. With the same justification, US-trained forces,
and mercenaries from US corporations that employ ex-military officers,
carry out “fumigation,” meaning chemical warfare operations that destroy
crops and livestock and drive peasants from their devastated lands.
Meanwhile the street price of drugs in the US does not rise, implying
that the effects on production are slight, and the prison population in
the US explodes to the highest recorded level in the world, far beyond
other industrial societies, largely as a consequence of the “drug war.”
It has long been understood that the most effective way to deal with the
drug problem – which is in the U.S., not in Colombia — is education and
treatment, and the least effective by far is out-of-country operations,
such as chemical warfare to destroy crops and other CI operations.
Funding is dramatically in inverse relation to effectiveness, and is
unaffected by failure to achieve the claimed goals.
The facts, hard to miss, raise some obvious questions. One of the
leading academic authorities on Colombia, Charles Bergquist, remarks
that “a provocative case can be made that US drug policy contributes
effectively to the control of an ethnically distinct and economically
deprived underclass at home and serves US economic and security
interests abroad.” Many criminologists and international affairs
analysts might regard this as a considerable understatement. Faith in
the proclaimed doctrines becomes still harder to sustain when we attend
to the relation between U.S. resort to subversion and violence and
increase in drug production back to World War II, documented in rich
detail by Alfred McCoy, Peter Dale Scott and others, recurring right at
this moment in Afghanistan. As Scott observes, reviewing many cases of
U.S. military intervention and subversion, with each “there has been a
dramatic boost to international drug-trafficking, including a rise in
U.S. drug consumption.” At the same time, the lives of Colombian
campesinos, indigenous people, and Afro-Colombians are destroyed with
the solemn claim that it is imperative to carry out these crimes to
prevent drug production and use.
In extenuation, it could be noted that fostering drug production is
hardly a US innovation: the British empire relied crucially on the most
extraordinary narcotrafficking enterprise in world history, with
horrifying effects in China and in India, much of which was conquered in
an effort to gain a monopoly on opium production.
The official pretexts are confronted with massive counterevidence, and
supported by no confirming evidence (apart from the declarations of
leaders, which invariably speak of benign intent and are therefore
uninformative, whatever their source). Suppose, nevertheless, that we
accept official doctrine, and assume that the goal of the US-run CI
operations in Colombia, including the chemical warfare that is ruining
the peasant society, is to eradicate drugs. And let’s also, for the sake
of argument, put aside the fact that US subversion and aggression
continue to lead to increase of production and use of drugs. On these
charitable assumptions, US operations in Colombia are truly scandalous.
That seems transparent. To bring the point out more clearly, consider
the fact, not in dispute, that deaths from tobacco vastly exceed those
from all hard drugs combined. Furthermore, hard drugs harm the user,
while tobacco harms others — not as much, to be sure, as alcohol, which
is heavily implicated in killing of others (automobile accidents,
alcohol-induced violence, etc.), but significantly. Deaths from “passive
smoking” probably exceed those from all hard drugs combined, and “soft
drugs” that are severely criminalized, like Marijuana, while doubtless
harmful (like coffee, red meat, etc.), are not known to have significant
lethal effects. Furthermore, while the Colombian cartels are not
permitted to place billboards in Times Square New York, or run ads on
TV, to induce children and other vulnerable sectors of the population to
use cocaine and heroin, there are no such barriers against advertising
for the far more lethal tobacco-based products, and in fact countries
have been threatened with serious trade sanctions if they violate the
sacred principles of “free trade” by attempting to regulate such
practices. An elementary conclusion follows at once: if the U.S. is
entitled to carry out chemical warfare targeting poor peasants in
Colombia, then Colombia, and China, and many others are surely entitled
to carry out far more extensive chemical warfare programs targeting
agribusiness production in North Carolina and Kentucky. Comment should
be unnecessary.
Colombia has violent history, in large part rooted in the fact that its
great natural wealth and opportunities are monopolized by narrow
privileged and often quite brutal sectors, while much of the population
lives in misery and endures severe repression. Colombia’s tragic history
took a new turn, however, in the early 1960s, when U.S. intervention
became a much more significant factor – not that it had been marginal
before, for example, when Theodore Roosevelt stole part of Colombia for
a canal that was of great importance for U.S. economic and strategic
interests. In 1962, John F. Kennedy in effect shifted the mission of the
Latin American military from “hemispheric defense,” a residue of World
War II, to “internal security,” a euphemism for war against the domestic
population.
There were significant effects throughout Latin America. One consequence
in Colombia, as Stokes reviews, was the official US recommendation to
rely on paramilitary terror against “known Communist proponents.” The
effects on Colombia were described by the president of the Colombian
Permanent Committee for Human Rights, the distinguished diplomat Alfredo
Vàzquez Carrizosa. Beyond the crimes that are institutionalized in the
“dual structure of a prosperous minority and an impoverished, excluded
majority, with great differences in wealth, income, and access to
political participation,” he wrote, the Kennedy initiatives led to an
“exacerbation of violence by external factors,” as Washington “took
great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency
brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads,” decisions
that “ushered in what is known in Latin America as the National Security
Doctrine.” This was not “defense against an external enemy, but a way to
make the military establishment the masters of the game…[with] the right
to combat the internal enemy, as set forth in the Brazilian doctrine,
the Argentine doctrine, the Uruguayan doctrine, and the Colombian
doctrine: it is the right to fight and to exterminate social workers,
trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the
establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists” – a term
with wide coverage in CI lingo, including human rights activists,
priests organizing peasants, labor leaders, others seeking to address
the “dual structure” by non-violent democratic means, and of course the
great mass of victims of the dual structure, if they dare to raise their
heads.
The policy was certainly not new. The horrifying example of Guatemala is
sufficient to show that. Nor was it restricted to Latin America. In many
ways, the early postwar CI operations in Greece (with some 150,000 dead)
and South Korea (with a death toll of 100,000) set the pattern long
before. Apart from its Guatemala atrocities, the Eisenhower
administration had overthrown the parliamentary government of Iran and
restored the brutal rule of the Shah in order to bar Iran from taking
control of its own resources, and in 1958, had carried out some of the
most extreme postwar clandestine operations in its effort to undermine
the parliamentary government of Indonesia, which was becoming
dangerously democratic, and to split off the outer islands, where most
of the resources were — just to mention a few examples. But there was a
qualitative change in the early 1960s.
In Latin America, the Kennedy administration orchestrated a military
coup in Brazil, which took place shortly after Kennedy’s assassination,
installing the first of the National Security States, complete with
large-scale torture, destruction of popular organizations and any
vestige of democracy, and intense repression. It was welcomed in
Washington as a “democratic rebellion,” “a great victory for free
world,” which prevented a “total loss to West of all South American
Republics” and should “create a greatly improved climate for private
investments.” The democratic revolution carried out by the neo-Nazi
generals was “the single most decisive victory of freedom in the
mid-twentieth century,” Kennedy’s Ambassador Lincoln Gordon held, “one
of the major turning points in world history” in this period. Shortly
after, the Indonesian problem was dealt with successfully as General
Suharto took over in a military coup, with a “staggering mass
slaughter,” as the New York Times described the outcome,“ “a gleam of
light in Asia,” on the words of their leading liberal commentator, James
Reston. As was known at once, the death toll was immense, perhaps half a
million or many more, mostly landless peasants. The threat of excessive
democracy that had troubled the Eisenhower administration was overcome,
with the destruction of the major mass-based political party in the
country, which “had won widespread support not as a revolutionary party
[despite its name: PKI, Indonesian Communist Party] but as an
organization defending the interests of the poor within the existing
system,” Australian Indonesia specialist Harold Crouch observes,
developing a “mass base among the peasantry” through its “vigor in
defending the interests of the…poor.” Western euphoria was
irrepressible, and continued as Suharto compiled one of the worst human
rights records of the late 20^(th) century, also invading East Timor and
carrying out a near-genocidal slaughter, with firm support from the U.S.
and U.K., among others, to the bloody end in late 1999. The gleam of
light in Indonesia also eliminated one of the pillars of the hated
non-aligned movement. A second was eliminated when Israel destroyed
Nasser’s army in 1967, firmly establishing the U.S.-Israel alliance that
has persisted since.
In Latin America, the Brazilian coup had a domino effect, as the
National Security Doctrine spread throughout the continent with varying
degrees of US initiative, but constant and decisive support, however
terrible the consequences. One example is “the first 9–11,” in Chile,
September 11, 1973, when General Pinochet’s forces bombed the
Presidential palace and demolished Latin America’s oldest and most
vibrant democracy, establishing a regime of torture and repression
thanks primarily to the secret police organization DINA that US military
intelligence compared to the KGB and the Gestapo – while Washington
firmly supported the regime. The official death toll of the first 9–11
was 3200, which would correspond to about 50,000 in the US; the actual
toll was doubtless much higher. Pinochet’s DINA soon moved to integrate
Latin American dictatorships in the international state terrorist
program “Operation Condor,” which killed and tortured mercilessly within
the countries and branched out to terrorist operations in Europe and the
U.S. The evil genius, Pinochet, was greatly honored, by Reagan and
Thatcher in particular, but quite generally. The assassination of a
respected diplomat in Washington was going too far, however, and
Operation Condor was wound down. The worst atrocities, in Argentina,
were yet to come, along with the expansion of the state terror to
Central America in the 1980s, leaving hundreds of thousands of corpses
and four countries in ruins, along with a condemnation of the U.S. by
the World Court for its “unlawful use of force” (in lay terms,
international terrorism), backed by two (vetoed) Security Council
resolutions, after which Washington escalated the terror to new heights.
Colombia’s travail was part of a far broader picture.
U.S. terror operations in Central America were accompanied by expansion
of the drug trade, the usual concomitant of international terrorism,
which relies crucially on criminal elements and untraceable financial
resources – meaning narcotics. Washington’s mobilization of radical
Islamists in Afghanistan, in collaboration with Pakistani intelligence
and other allies, led to a far larger explosion of drug production and
narcotrafficking, with lethal effects in the region and far beyond.
These U.S. policies proceeded side by side with the “drug war” at home
and in Colombia, no embarrassing questions raised. Drug production and
distribution are rapidly increasing in Afghanistan and Kosovo,
consistent with the traditional pattern, while Colombian peasants suffer
and die from chemical warfare attacks and are driven to urban slums
where they can rot alongside millions of others in one of the world’s
largest refugee catastrophes. And in the U.S., drugs remain available
with no change, the measures that are known to be effective in dealing
with drug problems (let alone the social conditions in which they are
arise) are scarcely pursued, and victims flow from urban slums to the
flourishing prison-industrial complex, as some criminologists call it.
The mass murderers and torturers of the Latin American National Security
States have sometimes had to face at least public inquiries into their
crimes. Some have even faced the bar of justice, though nothing remotely
like what would be appropriate to such crimes by Western standards.
Others, however, are completely immune. In the major study of Operation
Condor, journalist/analyst John Dinges observes that “Only in the United
States, whose diplomats, intelligence, and military were so intimately
intertwined with the military dictators and their operational
subordinates, has there been judicial silence on the crimes of the
Condor years.” The United States, he continues, “conferred on itself a
kind of de facto amnesty even more encompassing than that enjoyed by its
Latin American allies: no truth commissions or any other kind of
official investigation was established to look into the human collateral
damage of the many proxy wars that were supported in Latin America or
elsewhere” – and, we may add, actual wars, including horrendous crimes,
shielded by the same self-declared amnesty.
The powerful are, typically, immune to prosecution or even serious
inquiry, even memory for that matter. Only their citizens can end such
crimes, and the far more terrible crimes that flow from permanent
immunity.
As Stokes reviews in convincing detail, U.S. policies persist while
pretexts and tactics shift as circumstances require. Sometimes the basic
principles are frankly stated. Thus diplomatic historian Gerald Haines
(also senior historian of the CIA) introduces his study of “the
Americanization of Brazil” by observing that “Following World War II the
United States assumed, out of self-interest, responsibility for the
welfare of the world capitalist system” – which does not mean the
welfare of the people of the system, as events were to prove, not
surprisingly. The enemy was “Communism.” The reasons were outlined by a
prestigious study group of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the
National Planning Association in a comprehensive 1955 study on the
political economy of U.S. foreign policy: the primary threat of
Communism, the study concluded, is the economic transformation of the
Communist powers “in ways that reduce their willingness and ability to
complement the industrial economies of the West.” It makes good sense,
then, that prospects of independent development should be regarded as a
serious danger, to be pre-empted by violence if necessary. That is
particularly true if the errant society shows signs of success in terms
that might be meaningful to others suffering from similar oppression and
injustice. In that case it becomes a “virus” that might “infect others,”
a “rotten apple” that might “spoil the barrel,” in the terminology of
top planners, describing the real domino theory, not the version
fabricated to frighten the domestic public into obedience.
The Cold War itself had similar characteristics, taking on a life of its
own because of scale. That is implicitly recognized by leading
establishment scholars, notably John Lewis Gaddis, regarded as the dean
of Cold War scholarship. He plausibly traces the origins of the Cold War
to 1917, when Russia broke free of its relations of semi-colonial
dependency on the West and sought to pursue an independent course.
Gaddis articulates fundamental principles perceptively when he regards
the very existence of the Bolshevik regime as a form of aggression, so
that the intervention of the Western powers was actually self-defense,
undertaken “in response to a profound and potentially far-reaching
intervention by the new Soviet government in the internal affairs, not
just of the West, but of virtually every country in the world,” namely,
“the Revolution’s challenge — which could hardly have been more
categorical — to the very survival of the capitalist order.” Change of
the social order in Russia and announcement of intentions to spread the
model elsewhere is aggression that elicits invasion as justified
self-defense.
The threat that Russia could prove to be a “virus” was very real,
Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George recognized, not only in the colonial
world but even in the rich industrial societies. Those concerns remained
very much alive into the 1960s, we know from the internal record. It
should come as no surprise, then, that these thoughts are reiterated
over and over, as when Kennedy-Johnson high-level planners warned that
the “very existence” of the Castro regime in Cuba is “successful
defiance” of U.S. policies going back to the Monroe Doctrine, so that
the “terrors of the earth” must be visited on Cuba, to borrow the phrase
of historian and Kennedy confidant Arthur Schlesinger, describing the
prime goal of Robert Kennedy, who was assigned responsibility for the
terrorist operations.
Colombia, again, falls well within a much more general pattern, though
in each case, the horrors that are endured are terrible in their own
special and indescribable ways.