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Title: The Culture of Fear Author: Noam Chomsky Date: July 1996 Language: en Topics: US foreign interventions, Latin America Source: Retrieved on 19th June 2021 from https://chomsky.info/199607__/ Notes: In Javier Giraldo, Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy, Common Courage Press, July, 1996
North American readers of Father Giraldo’s documentation of the reign of
terror that engulfed Colombia during the “Dirty War” waged by the state
security forces and their paramilitary associates from the early 1980s.
The first is that Colombia’s “democra-tatorship,” as Eduardo Galeano
termed this amalgam of democratic forms and totalitarian terror, has
managed to compile the worst human rights record in the hemisphere in
recent years, no small achievement when one considers the competition.
The second is that Colombia has had accessories in crime, primary among
them the government of the United States, though Britain, Israel,
Germany, and others have also helped to train and arm the assassins and
torturers of the narco-military-landowner network that maintains
“stability” in a country that is rich in promise, and a nightmare for
many of its people.
In July 1989, the U.S. State Department announced plans for subsidized
sales of military equipment to Colombia, allegedly “for antinarcotics
purposes.” The sales were “justified” by the fact that “Colombia has a
democratic form of government and does not exhibit a consistent pattern
of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”
A few months before, the Commission of Justice and Peace that Father
Giraldo heads had published a report documenting atrocities in the first
part of 1988, including over 3,000 politically-motivated killings, 273
in “social cleansing” campaigns. Political killings averaged eight a
day, with seven people murdered in their homes or in the street and one
“disappeared.”
Citing this report, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) added
that “the vast majority of those who have disappeared in recent years
are grass-roots organizers, peasant or union leaders, leftist
politicians, human rights workers and other activists,” over 1500 by the
time of the State Department’s praise for Colombia’s democracy and its
respect for human rights. During the 1988 electoral campaigns, 19 of 87
mayoral candidates of the sole independent political party, the UP, were
assassinated, along with over 100 of its other candidates. The Central
Organization of Workers, a coalition of trade unions formed in 1986, had
by then lost over 230 members, most of them found dead after brutal
torture.
But the “democratic form of government” emerged without stain, and with
no “consistent pattern of gross violations” of human rights.
By the time of the State Department’s report, the practices it found
praiseworthy were being more efficiently implemented. Political killings
in 1988 and 1989 rose to 11 a day, the Colombian branch of the Andean
Commission of Jurists reported. From 1988 through early 1992, 9,500
people were assassinated for political reasons along with 830
disappearances and 313 massacres (between 1988 and 1990) of peasants and
poor people.
Throughout these years, as usual, the primary victims of state terror
were peasants. In 1988, grassroots organizations in one southern
department reported a “campaign of total annihilation and scorched
earth, Vietnam-style,” conducted by the military forces “in a most
criminal manner, with assassinations of men, women, elderly and
children. Homes and crops are burned, obligating the peasants to leave
their lands.” Also in 1988 the government of Colombia established a new
judicial regime that called for “total war against the internal enemy.”
It authorized “maximal criminalization of the political and social
opposition,” a European-Latin American Inquiry reported in Brussels,
reviewing “the consolidation of state terror in Colombia.”
As the State Department report appeared a year after these events, the
Colombian Minister of Defense again articulated the doctrine of “total
war” by state power “in the political, economic, and social arenas.”
Guerrillas were the official targets, but as a high military official
had observed in 1987, their organizations were of minor importance: “the
real danger,” he explained, is “what the insurgents have called the
political and psychological war,” the efforts “to control the popular
elements” and “to manipulate the masses.” The “subversives” hope to
influence unions, universities, media, and so on, and the government
must counter this “war” with its own “total war in the political,
economic, and social arenas.”
Reviewing doctrine and practice, the Brussels study concludes
realistically that the “internal enemy” of the state terrorist apparatus
extends to “labor organizations, popular movements, indigenous
organizations, oppositional political parties, peasant movements,
intellectual sectors, religious currents, youth and student groups,
neighborhood organizations,” indeed any group that must be secured
against undesirable influences. “Every individual who in one or another
manner supports the goals of the enemy must be considered a traitor and
treated in that manner,” a Colombian military manual prescribes.
The manual dates from 1963. At that time, violence in Colombia was
coming to be “exacerbated by external factors,” the president of the
Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights, former Minister of
Foreign Affairs Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, wrote some years later,
reviewing the outcome. “During the Kennedy administration,” he
continues, Washington “took great pains to transform our regular armies
into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death
squads.”
These initiatives “ushered in what is known in Latin America as the
National Security Doctrine, ... 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, 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.”
The “Dirty War” escalated in the early 1980s — not only in Colombia — as
the Reagan administration extended these programs throughout the region,
leaving it devastated, strewn with hundreds of thousands of corpses
tortured and mutilated people who might otherwise have been
insufficiently supportive of the establishment, perhaps even influenced
by “subversives.”
North Americans should never allow themselves to forget the origins of
“the Brazilian doctrine, the Argentine doctrine, the Uruguayan doctrine,
the Colombian doctrine,” and others like them. They were crafted right,
then adapted by students trained and equipped right here. The basic
guidelines are spelled out in U.S. manuals of counterinsurgency and “low
intensity conflict.”
These are euphemisms, technical terms for state terror, a fact well
known in Latin America. When Archbishop Oscar Romero wrote to President
Carter in 1980 shortly before his assassination, vainly pleading with
him to end U.S. support for the state terrorist, he informed the rector
of the Jesuit University, Father Ellacuria, that he was prompted “by the
new concept of special warfare, which consists in murderously
eliminating every endeavor of the popular organizations under the
allegation of Communism or terrorism ...” So Father Ellacuria reported
shortly before he was assassinated by the same hands a decade later; the
events framed the murderous decade with the symbolism as gruesome as it
was appropriate.
The agents of state terror are the beneficiaries of U.S. training
designed to ensure that they have an “understanding of, and orientation
toward, U.S. objectives,” Defense Secretary Robert McNamera informed
National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy in 1965. This is a matter of
particular importance “in the Latin American cultural environment,”
where it is recognized that the military must be prepared to “remove
government leaders from office, whenever, in the judgment of the
military, the conduct of these leaders is injurious to the welfare of
the nation.” It is the right of the military and those who provide them
with the proper orientation who are entitled to determine the welfare of
the nation, not the beasts of burden toiling and suffering and expiring
in their own lands.
When the State Department announced new arms shipments as a reward for
Colombia’s achievements in human rights and democracy, it surely had
access to the record of atrocities that had been compiled by the leading
international and Colombian human rights organizations. It was fully
aware of the U.S. role in establishing and maintaining the regime of
terror and oppression. The example is, unfortunately, typical of a
pattern that hardly varies, as can be readily verified.
As the “Dirty War” of the 1980s took its ever more grisly toll, U.S.
participation increased. From 1984 through 1992, 6,844 Colombian
soldiers were trained under the U.S. international Military Education
and Training Program. Over 2,000 Colombian officers were trained from
1990 to 1992, as “violence reached unprecedented levels” during the
presidency of Cesar Gaviria, WOLA reported, confirming conclusions of
international human rights monitors.
President Gaviria was a particular favorite of Washington, so admired
that the Clinton administration imposed him as Secretary-General of the
Organization of American States in a power play that aroused much
resentment. “He has been very forward looking in building democratic
institutions in a country where it was sometimes dangerous to do so,”
the U.S. representative to the OAS explained — not inquiring into the
reasons for the “dangers,” however. The training program for Colombian
officers is the largest in the hemisphere, and U.S. military aid to
Colombia now amounts to about half the total for the entire hemisphere.
It has increased under Clinton, Human Rights Watch reports, adding that
he planned to turn emergency overdrawing facilities when the Pentagon
did not suffice for still further increases.
The official cover story for the participation in crime is the war
“against the guerrillas and narcotrafficking operations.” In its 1989
announcement of new arms sales, the State Department could rely on its
human right reports, which attributed virtually all violence to the
guerrillas and narcotraffickers. Hence the U.S. is “justified” in
providing military equipment and training for the mass murderers and
torturers.
A month later, George Bush announced the largest shipment of arms ever
authorized under the emergency provisions of the Foreign Assistance Act.
The arms were not sent to the National Police, which is responsible for
almost all counter-narcotic operations, but to the army. The helicopters
and jet planes are useless for the drug war, as was pointed out at once,
but not for other purposes. Human rights groups soon reported the
bombing of villages and other atrocities. It is also impossible to
imagine that Washington is not aware that the security forces it is
maintaining are closely linked to the narcotrafficking operations, and
that exactly as their leaders frankly say, the target is the “internal
enemy” that might support or be influenced by “subversives” in some way.
A January 1994 conference on state terror organized by Jesuits in San
Salvador observed that “it is important to explore ... what weight the
culture of terror has had in domesticating the expectations of the
majority vis-a-vis alternatives different to those of the powerful.”
That is the crucial point, wherever such methods are used to subdue the
“internal enemy.”
Israeli physician Ruchama Marton, who has been at the forefront of
investigation of the use of torture by the security forces of her own
country, points out that while confessions obtained by torture are of
course meaningless, the real purpose is not confession. Rather, it is
silence, “silence induced by fear.” “Fear is contagious,” she continues,
“and spreads to the other members of the oppressed group, to silence and
paralyze them. To impose silence through violence is torture’s real
purpose, in the most profound an fundamental sense.” The same is true of
all other aspects of the doctrines that have been devised and
implemented with our guidance and support under a series of fraudulent
guides.
To impose silence on the internal enemy is necessary in the
“democra-tatorships” that U.S. policy has sought to impose on its
domains ever since it “assumed, out of self-interest, responsibility for
the welfare of the world capitalist system,” in the words of diplomatic
Gerald Haines, senior historian of the CIA, discussing the U.S. takeover
of Brazil in 1945—and indeed before, with important echoes at home as
well. It is particularly important to impose silence in the region with
the highest inequality in the world, thanks in no small measure to
policies of the superpower that largely controls it.
It is necessary to impose silence and spread fear in countries like
Colombia, where the top three percent of the landed elite own over 70%
of arable land while 57% of the poorest farmers subsist on under 3% — a
country where 40% of the population live in “absolute poverty,” unable
to satisfy basic subsistence needs according to an official government
report in 1986, and 18% live in “absolute misery,” unable to meet
nutritional needs. The Colombian Institute of Family Welfare estimates
that four and a half million children under 14 are hungry, half the
country’s children.
Recall that we are speaking of a country of enormous resources and
potential. It has “one of the healthiest and most flourishing economies
in Latin America,” Latin Americanist John Martz writes in Current
History, lauding this triumph of capitalism in a society with
“democratic structures” which, “notwithstanding inevitable flaws, are
among the most solid on the continent,” a model of “well-established
political stability” — conclusions that are not inaccurate, if not quite
in the sense he seeks to convey
The effects of U.S. arms and military training are not confined to
Colombia. The record of horrors is all too full. In the Jesuit journal
America, Rev. Daniel Santiago, a priest working in El Salvador, reported
in 1990 the story of a peasant woman who returned home one day to find
her mother, sister, and three children sitting around a table, the
decapitated head of each person placed on the table in front of the
body, the hands arranged on top “as if each body was stroking its own
head.” The assassins, from the Salvadoran National Guard, had found it
hard to keep the head of an 18-month-old baby in place, so they nailed
the hands to it. A large plastic bowl filled with blood stood in the
center of the table.
Two years earlier, the Salvadoran human rights group that continued to
function despite the assassination of its founders and directors
reported that 13 bodies had been found in the preceding two weeks, most
showing signs of torture, including two women who had been hanged from a
tree by their hair, their breasts cut off and their faces painted red.
The discoveries were familiar, but the timing is significant, just as
Washington was successfully completing the cynical exercise of exempting
its murderous clients from the terms of the Central America peace
accords that called for “justice, freedom and democracy,” “respect for
human rights,” and guarantees for “the endless inviolability of all
forms of life and liberty.” The record is endless, and endlessly
shocking.
Such macabre scenes, which rarely reached the mainstream in the United
States, are designed for intimidation. Father Santiago writes that
“People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador — they are
decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the
landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by Salvadoran Treasury Police;
their severed genitalia are stuffed in their mouths. Salvadoran women
are not just raped by the national guard; their wombs are cut from their
bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children;
they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones
while parents are forced to watch.” “The aesthetics of terror in El
Salvador is religious.” The intention is to ensure that the individual
is totally subordinated to the interests of the Fatherland, which is why
death squads are sometimes called the “Army of National Salvation” by
the governing ARENA party.
The same is true in neighboring Guatemala. In the traditional “culture
of fear,” Latin American scholar Piero Gleijeses writes, peace and order
were guaranteed by ferocious repression, and its contemporary
counterpart follows the same course: “Just as the Indian was branded a
savage beast to justify his exploitation, so those who have sought
social guerrillas, or terrorists, or drug dealers, or whatever the
current term of art may be.” The fundamental reason, however, is always
the same: the savage beast may fall under the influence of “subversives”
who challenge the regime of injustice, oppression and terror that must
continue to serve the interests of foreign investors and domestic
privilege.
Throughout these grim years, nothing has been more inspiring than the
courage and dedication of those who have sought to expose and overcome
the culture of fear in their suffering countries. They have left
martyrs, whose voices have been silenced by the powerful — yet another
crime.
But they continue to struggle on. Father Giraldo’s remarkable work and
eloquent words should not only inspire us, but also impel us to act to
bring these terrors to an end, as we can. His testimony here contains an
“urgent appeal.” It should be answered, but it does not go far enough.
Our responsibilities extend well beyond. The fate of Colombians and many
others hinges on our willingness and ability to recognize and meet them.