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Human Rights in Colombia

By Bruce Davidson

If you thought it couldn't happen again, look closely at the situation in Colombia. The basic dynamic there is the same as in Southeast Asia forty years ago: multinational corporations want access to unexploited natural resources in a third-world country. The United States government creates a smokescreen for military intervention backed by billions of taxpayer dollars, and millions of civilians suffer the terrible consequences. But this is the new millennium and there is a new neoliberal world order. American citizens are much more skeptical about the machinations of our government, so it has learned how to dominate foreign resources without resorting to "domino theory" rhetoric or losing many soldiers.

The new methodology is relatively simple. First, create an excuse that touches on a domestic problem (for example, the "war on drugs"). Then pay billions of dollars to train the foreign country's army commanders (such as at the School of the Americas, Fort Benning, Georgia). Next, exploit the country's existing civil war by giving billions of dollars in military aid and intelligence assistance to right-wing armies and paramilitary organizations (for example, the recently-approved "Plan Colombia"). US troops are replaced by that country's own army and their paramilitary allies, who effectively become mercenaries on their own soil. Rich elites in the impoverished country buy into the US plan out of self-interest. In the end, it is a recipe for human tragedy.

This coldly calculated foreign policy has been termed "low-intensity conflict" and has been implemented mercilessly throughout Latin America in the last decades. But in Colombia the stakes are raised to a new level. Colombia, whose army already has the worst human rights record of any in the Western hemisphere, boosted the stakes in the civil war when it accepted the US-designed "Plan Colombia" this year. Under the guise of the "war on drugs," almost a billion dollars a year - mostly military hardware and intelligence assistance - will be pumped into the Colombian military. It is clear that the plan is only superficially intended to halt drug production in Colombia since the primary military focus is on the southern provinces (controlled by the leftist guerrillas of the FARC) whereas the majority of the narcotraffickers are known to be based in Medellin and Cali and farther north.

Some recent events have brought awareness of the grave human rights situation in Colombia. In September 2000, human rights workers and church members from Colombia who were witnesses to the massacre in Santo Domingo, Colombia on December 13, 1998 testified in tribunals in Toronto and Chicago. These tribunals, organized by solidarity groups from the US and Canada, were evaluating evidence in the massacre, in which seven children and nine adults died and twenty-five others were wounded. The Colombian government continues to deny responsibility, claiming that leftist guerrillas from the FARC were to blame.

The Chicago tribunal was held at Northwestern University on September 22 and 23. Among the Colombians that testified were two Dominican clergy members, Sister Carolina and Brother Omar, who also spoke at events in Chicago and Champaign-Urbana prior to the Chicago tribunal. The evidence presented by eyewitnesses was consistent and unequivocal: on December 13, 1998, US-trained and funded Colombian army units bombed unarmed Santo Domingo residents using US-manufactured munitions. Analysis by American and Canadian forensic munitions experts, including Barry Romo from the Chicago VVAW chapter, confirm the accounts of survivors that no exchange between the FARC and the army occurred, and that the munitions used were precisely the type supplied to the army by the US.

The event on September 20 at the Illinois Disciples Foundation in Champaign-Urbana was a great success, with more than sixty people in attendance. Later that evening, folks were treated to the first local screening of a new video detailing the situation in Barrancabermeja, where union organizers have suffered some of the most serious repression in recent years at the hands of the Colombian army and right-wing paramilitaries.

More Colombians came to Chicago on the weekend of November 3-4, 2000 to attend a conference titled, "US Policy and Human Rights in Colombia," sponsored by the Chicago Colombia Committee, Amnesty International, Global Exchange, the US/Colombia Coordinating Office (Washington, DC), the Colombia Labor Monitor, VVAW and other national and Chicago-area groups. At the DePaul University campus, over a hundred attendees listened to the former governor of Choco, Luis Gilberto Murillo, and several union, human rights and indigenous rights activists speaking about the consequences of "Plan Colombia" for the majority of the population. At present, half of all Colombians live below the absolute poverty level, and their insecurity will only increase as the militarization increases. Following the presentations, the attendees split into working groups to coordinate efforts amongst the various cities and share organizing strategies aimed at educating folks here in the US and influencing congress members who recently voted for "Plan Colombia."

It is heartening to see that, even when there is a complete lack of debate in the mainstream American media about "Plan Colombia," hundreds of activists from around the country and in Chicago are up to speed on their analysis and ready to work harder in their communities to educate and organize around Colombia. We recognize that we cannot afford another Vietnam in Colombia, from neither the Colombian perspective nor that of the United States.