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Colombia: Death Squads, Corruption and U.S. AssistanceBy Evan DouthitBy Evan Douthit Suddenly Colombia has made the hysteria-of-the-month issue in the U.S. media. We all know by now what the hysteria-of-the-month is. It's when the U.S. media and politicians make a great deal of noise about some issue, usually far away, to either divert people's attention away from pressing issues in the U.S. or to spread confusion about a pressing issue. Sometimes the hysteria does both. Then after several weeks of ranting, a few laws are passed, some money is sent, and the issue is virtually dropped. The targets of these hysterias are people who are removed from the center of power of the U.S. media, U.S. corporations and the U.S. government. The hysteria around the rain forest destruction in Brazil was one recent example. The destruction of the rain forests are truly a horrifying development. But one would have never surmised from the coverage that it is. West Europe, Japan and especially the U.S. that have wrecked, and continue to wreck, the most havoc on the world environment. I do not have much sympathy for the Brazilian elite. They are greedy slime who have sold their country to the U.S. and West Europe and preside over a society where four out of five live below the poverty line, where three in the five live below the extreme line and where one in three live under the absolute misery line. Still, the ranting over the rain forest is suspicious, especially since the Brazilian side of the story was simply not transmitted during the "hate month." (This is another sign of a hysteria of the month campaign, the other side's defense does not have to be reported, leaving un-cautious readers to assume that the victim, caught read handed in vileness, could only hold his head in shame before the moral titans of the U.S. press.) What the Brazilians say, in their publications and presidential debates, is that West Europe and the U.S. are not distressed that the Amazon is being exploited to death. It is that too much of the exploiting to death is being done by the Brazilians and not enough by the U.S. and West Europe! Furthermore, the Brazilians assert that while an accelerating ecological crisis threatens humanity's survival, the developed nations are simply shifting the blame for the conditions they have created onto the poor and backward nations. Meanwhile the "responsible" U.S, West Europe and Japan "solve" their toxic waste disposal problems by dumping them on the 3rd World, poisoning the land and water in Latin America in order to postpone the day of reckoning in the developing world.
Colombia's Turn The Colombia hysteria follows the same pattern. First the U.s. is scapegoating third world peasants for our own drug crisis. After doing everything we could to create societies in Latin America where the dollar is king and "export or die" is the slogan, we blame Latin Americans for taking what is actually only a small percentage of the money made on the international drug trade. Yes, it is not our fault that we're all doped up, it's these fiends from somewhere else who irresponsibly take our money! Obviously drugs, such as tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, synthetic and natural opiates, are a serious problem. They are a problem that people everywhere want solved. But, heaven forbid, that we would ever admit that in this best of all possible countries people would be so miserable, alienated and without hope that they would simply try to blot out reality. Heaven forbid that we would ever admit that our culture, which teaches instant gratification, that trains people to seek instant cure for their problems in something that could be bought over a counter, and then locks them into an anti-human environment (the suburbs) or worse (the West Side of Chicago), could be in any way responsible. That would be too obvious. That is something the power elite could be held to account for, at least in theory. Far better that we should talk about the Colombians. But diversion is only part of what is going on here. There is the whole question of shutting down civil liberties in the war on drugs. All evidence and experience says that shutting down civil liberties will not stop the drug business, it will stop civil liberties. Besides, if they're really so upset about drug addiction, why does it take six months to get into a treatment program? Not that drug victims in the U.S. are being totally ignored. They too can be scapegoated, the way one recent NY TIMES article blamed them for the collapse of the public health system. No mention was made in that article, of course, to the mammoth budget cuts being made in health care. Cuts made to pay off the debt run up by President "Feel Good" Ronnie and his out of control plastic. But back to Colombia, drugs and foreign policy. We can thank Ronnie for one thing. He brought U.S. foreign policy into such disrepute worldwide, and even here, that a whole new excuse for interfering in other countries had to be manufactured. So the new president, what's his name, has an excuse to intervene elsewhere, while pretending for U.S. public opinion that he is doing something about the substance abuse problem.
But that is only half the story. 99% of the problem with the mainstream media in the U.S. is not what they report (even though at least 50% of what they do report are gross errors or deliberate lies), but what they do not report. Very few Americans, for example, are aware that four years ago a new, progressive political party was formed in Colombia, the Patriotic Union. In its four years of existence more than 800 of its members have been murdered by death squads. These eight hundred included more than four Colombian congressmen, including the party leader Senator Jaime Pardo Leal, the former head of the Judges Trade Union. These included Jose Antequera, the number two leader of the UP, a 34 year old congressman, who was gunned down by hit men at the Bogota International Airport this spring. The murdered have also included mayors, city councilors, trade union and community activists. Three years ago the United Workers Central was formed, a trade union confederation with 800,000 members, the largest in Colombia. Since then more than 320 trade unionists have been murdered, 80% of them elected union officials. More than 60 teachers. More than 30 judges. More than 40 banana workers in the Uraba area. The main war in Colombia is not the war between the government and the Medellin Cartel. The main war is the "dirty war" against the opposition, if you can call it a war when death squads and paid assassins murder hundreds and thousands of unarmed and defenseless government opponents. The Medellin Cartel has been linked closely to this war, so has, often, the military. Both the Medellin Cartel and the military sponsor and support the paramilitary groups operating in Colombia. There are more than 150 of these paramilitary groups, as the Administrative Department of Security (the secret police) has reported. And they have often been trained by Israeli and British mercenaries. (Interestingly enough, the Administrative Department of security has asked Interpol to seek the arrest of one of these mercenaries, Israeli colonel Yahir Klein. Israeli ambassador to Bogota, Tadmor was quoted as saying that Israel does not "extradite its citizens" and that "Klein is a good soldier. He did not know whom he was working for.") Meanwhile, not only are the paramilitaries well trained, they are well armed. Earlier this year the Minister of Defense claimed that the government had intercepted a shipment of $10 million in weapons for the Colombian congress accused him of perjury, for telling congress this when he knew that the guns were brought by the drug lords for their paramilitary groups. It should be noted that these paramilitaries are not engaged against the guerrillas, of whom there are many in Colombia. When a paramilitary squad out murdering and threatening unarmed people does run into guerrillas the paramilitaries get cut down. But this does not happen very often. They are good at avoiding opponents who have guns. And while the drug lord and army hitmen are armed to the teeth, only a handful of the judges whose lives have been threatened get bodyguards and armored cars (and that does not seem to do much good either). The judges have been reduced to begging the government to sell them guns with which they can defend themselves. (Actually they asked the government to take it out of their wages in installments, a good idea since the judges have often had to strike to get paid.) On numerous occasions witnesses and survivors have identified military officers as having taken part in massacres and death squad attacks, but they are almost never punished. The killers are operating under almost total immunity. But on top of slaughter of unarmed civilians, there is a drug war of sorts, the war between the Cali and Medellin Cartels for control of the New York market. To understand this we have to go back to the beginning. The original drug boom in Colombia occurred in the 70's , with the boom in Colombian marijuana. The Colombian marijuana industry fell into crisis in the late 70's when the Florida marijuana crop took over the lucrative New York and Miami markets. At just this desperate point, the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, causing enormous disruption in the world opium market, as Afghanistan was one of the great world producers. Suddenly, the Colombian drug industry, with most of the infrastructure in place for export, and with a sudden need in the U.S. market for a new hard drug to take the place of the missing opiates, turned into massive cocaine trafficking. And they had some interesting help. This summer the Costa Rican legislature released a report on the drug trafficking in Costa Rica, which revealed that the Medellin Cartel used the Oliver North Contra supply network to ship at least two and a half tons of cocaine to the United States. (As a result of this report Oliver North and former National Security Advisor John Poindexter, former U.S. ambassador Tambs, and former CIA chief in Costa Rica Fernandez have been barred from Costa Rica.) As this new industry boomed, several major cartels were formed, the most important being the Cali and Medellin Cartels. In almost all of the U.s. reporting on the issue, only the Medellin Cartel is mentioned. There ware significant differences between the two cartels. Perhaps the most important, is that the Cali cartel Is much more sophisticated and "mainstream." They were much more successful at integrating themselves into the previous business elite and oligarchy in Colombia, while the Medellin Cartel was cruder and ruder. Two years ago the two cartels went to war over the new York market, and scores have been killed in this battle. Naturally competition for sales heated up, and prices, and profits fell. Some people might find it interesting that just as prices and profits were falling drastically, the Colombian government began its offensive against the Medellin Cartel, while conspicuously ignoring the existence of the Cali Cartel. The attack on the Medellin Cartel was unleashed by the murder of Luis Carlos Galan, a Liberal Party candidate for the President who was leading in the polls. But there are good reasons to doubt that the Medellin Cartel killed Galan, crude and vicious as they are. And for all the noise, the attack on the Medellin Cartel has been extremely ineffective. None of the top leaders of the Cartel have been arrested. The Reason given by the Defense and Interior ministers: The Medellin Cartel has informants within the army and police who give warning of the upcoming raids. (A document captured earlier in the year gave evidence that the Cali Cartel even had informants on the Colombian National Security Council!) It is highly unlikely that the present farce, or if one prefers, war, will lead to anything more than a temporary cut in supply and rise in price and profits. Speaking of prices and profits, the U.S. recently gave a lesson on how concerned it is that Colombians and Latin Americans in general have some alternative to growing cocoa bushes. Thanks largely to U.S. efforts, the world coffee agreement was sabotaged. Speaking at Madison, Wisconsin on October 6, Dr. Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, the former foreign minister of Colombia and the president chairman of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights, noted that the destruction of the world coffee agreement would cost his country at least $400 million a year and force the next president of Colombia to declare a moratorium on payments of the country's foreign debt. Then, there is the guerrilla war in Colombia. The present guerrilla war in Colombia can be traced back as far as 1948, when the popular leader Eleizar Gaitan was murdered in Bogota, leading to a mammoth revolt, the famous "Bogotazo," which almost no one in the U.S. has ever heard of because it is seldom mentioned in U.S. press articles about Colombia. What followed was civil war between the Liberal and Conservative parties in which anywhere from 200,000 to 500,000 people died in what was known as "la Violencia." This is also something that almost no one in the U.S. has ever heard of, again for the same reason. The oldest of the present guerrilla groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), began as operations in the 60's. Other groups, such as the ELN, the EPL and the M-19 also began operating. At the time of the inauguration of President Virgilio Barco in 1986, top leaders of his own Liberal Party claimed that the guerrillas controlled 50% of the area of Colombia. A peace process was begun under previous president Belisario Bentacur, a process that has wavered between semi-progress and total war ever since. At present the M-19, which leads less than 10% of the guerrillas, is holding talks with the government on disbanding, while the rest of the groups, who make up the Simon Bolivar Guerrilla Coordination, are in a state of semi-truce and semi-talks. But they are growing impatient, both with the failure of the government move forward on talks, and the continued murder of progressive political trade union, and community activists. The military aid and military advisors that President Bush is sending to it is the war against the guerillas, and the war against the unarmed civilian opposition. The aid is for conventional military war, not for a war against a mafia. What can be done about this horror before Colombia, a country of 30 million people will almost twice the land area of France, becomes another El Salvador, only two orders of magnitude greater?
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