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July 29, 2002 Washington Targets Colombia's Rebels Last week, the U.S. Congress approved a $28.9 billion counterterrorism bill that includes $35 million in funding for Colombia. While the aid will supposedly be used to combat all three Colombian armed groups that are on the U.S. State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations, U.S. officials have clearly singled out the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) as "the most dangerous international terrorist group based in this hemisphere." Once signed into law, the counterterrorism bill will also eliminate conditions that currently restrict U.S. drug aid to Colombia to counternarcotics programs, allowing the military aid that constitutes more than 70 percent of the $1.3 billion Plan Colombia and $625 million Andean Regional Initiative programs to be used for counterinsurgency operations. Additionally, Washington recently announced that it is placing a $5 million bounty on the heads of guerrilla leaders and intends to implement a scheme to publish their names and photos on food packages and matchbooks. Meanwhile, reports have also surfaced regarding a possible military intervention against Colombia's leftist guerrillas by a U.S.-led multinational force.
While the aid is supposed to be used against all three illegal armed groups that are on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations--the FARC, a smaller leftist guerrilla group known as the National Liberation Army (ELN), and a right-wing paramilitary militia called the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC)--most of the anti-terrorist rhetoric from U.S. officials has clearly focused on the FARC as Washington's principal enemy in Colombia. Some 70 percent of the more than $2 billion in counterterrorism aid is going to a Colombian military that is closely-allied with one of the groups Washington itself considers a terrorist organization: the AUC (incidentally, leaders of the coalition of regional paramilitary groups recently announced they are disbanding the AUC and are looking into establishing a new national paramilitary organization). This right-wing paramilitary force consists of 10,000 fighters who are responsible for 75 percent of Colombia's human rights abuses, including a huge majority of the country's massacres. The strong ties between the Colombian Armed Forces and the paramilitaries have helped preserve a corrupt social, political and economic system in Colombia that is closely aligned to U.S. political and economic interests in the region. In contrast to the AUC's essentially pro-U.S. stance, the FARC has specifically targeted U.S. economic interests in Colombia through its criticism of the U.S.-dominated economic globalization process and bombings of oil pipelines used by U.S. corporations. Consequently, it is the FARC who are the principal targets on Washington's terrorist hit list. Every penny of the $35 million in new counterterrorism aid is earmarked for use against the FARC and the ELN or to protect those sectors of society targeted by the rebels. Some $25 million of the aid is to be used to prevent kidnapping, a tactic that the leftist guerrillas use to help fund their insurgencies. Another $4 million is to be used to fortify police stations against rebel attacks, while the remaining $6 million is for immediate protection of Occidental's Caño Limon pipeline.
While there are plans to use some U.S. funds to create a special security unit to target paramilitary leaders, according to Amnesty International it is nothing more than "cynical window dressing." The human rights group claims that the Colombian military already knows where the paramilitaries are located, "The sites of paramilitary bases are frequently known to the security forces and are often located in the immediate vicinity of military bases" and that "military units continue to carry out operations in coordination with paramilitaries." Instead of protecting the millions of impoverished Colombians who are victims of right-wing terrorism, the Bush administration is focusing on potential kidnapping victims (mostly upper and middle class citizens targeted by the guerrillas because of their wealth and their support for the existing political and economic system), police officers stationed in rural towns targeted by the rebels (unlike in most countries, the militaristic Colombian National Police is administered by the Department of Defense), and protecting the risky foreign business investments of a U.S. corporation by defending the Caño Limon oil pipeline. In yet another display of the political bias behind Washington's Colombian engagement, two Colombian television networks--RCN and Caracol--revealed last week that the United States has placed a bounty of $5 million on the heads of FARC and ELN leaders as part of its global counterterrorism strategy. Additionally, the Bush administration is seeking to implement a campaign in Colombia in which the names and photos of guerrilla leaders would be placed on posters, food packages and matchboxes. However, despite their purportedly equal status on the State Department's terrorist list, there was no mention of a reward for paramilitary leaders or the adorning of food packages with mug shots of notorious AUC militia bosses like Carlos Castaño and Salvatore Mancuso. Also last week, a Brazilian newspaper revealed plans to create a U.S.-led multinational military force to combat Colombia's guerrilla groups. Citing the Brazilian Defense Ministry and comments made by a Chilean army colonel, José Miguel Pizarro, the paper Jornal do Brasil claimed that Chile's war academy has been studying a plan since January that calls for 2,600 troops from the United States, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador and Peru to intervene in Colombia's conflict under the auspices of the United Nations. Colonel Pizarro claims that the intervention could take place in January 2004 after incoming Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's military offensive has placed the country's leftist rebels on the defensive. While Ecuador, Chile and Uruguay have denied the existence of such a plan, its similarity to previous proposals made by Washington make it plausible. In recent years, the United States has lobbied unsuccessfully in the Organization of American States (OAS) to establish requirements that call on the regional body to create a multinational force to intervene wherever democracy is threatened. But many Latin American leaders are reluctant to agree to the U.S. proposal, fearful that Washington is attempting to use the OAS as a means of legitimizing direct military intervention in Colombia's civil conflict. Clearly, the Bush administration's counterterrorism strategies in Colombia are primarily targeting an armed group that is nothing more than one of several armed actors in Colombia's civil conflict. Furthermore, the hypocrisy so often evident in U.S. foreign policy has never been more evident than in the recent decision to target one Colombian terrorist group--the FARC--by implementing strategies that clearly aid another more brutal terrorist organization--the AUC. None of the Colombian groups designated by Washington as terrorists possess an international agenda or reach comparable to that of Al Qaeda, nor is there any evidence that they constitute any direct threat to the United States or its citizens. In fact, to the contrary, it just so happens that the tactics utilized by Colombia's most brutal terrorist force serve U.S. political and economic interests in the region. This article originally appeared in Colombia Report, an online journal that was published by the Information Network of the Americas (INOTA).
Copyright © 2003 Colombia Journal. All rights reserved. |
Despite
repeated claims by U.S. officials during Congressional hearings
in 2000 for the Clinton administration's $1.3 billion contribution
to Plan Colombia that the huge aid package did not signify an expansion
of U.S. military involvement in Colombia beyond the drug war, the
mission creep that critics warned of has now occurred. In reality,
Colombia's counterterrorism aid far exceeds the stated $35 million
in the new counterterrorism bill. When the $1.3 billion Plan Colombia
and the $625 million Andean Regional Initiative aid packages, which
can now be used against Colombia's illegal armed groups, are taken
into account, the amount of counterterrorism aid going to Colombia
totals more than $2 billion over a three year period. Additionally,
the Federal budget for the 2003 fiscal year contains $98 million
in U.S. aid that will be used to train and equip an elite Colombian
army battalion whose primary mission will be to protect Los Angeles-based
Occidental Petroleum's 490-mile Caño Limon oil pipeline,
which has been repeatedly bombed by the rebels.
The
counterterrorism aid is not being used to target the paramilitaries
or to protect their victims. According to human rights organizations,
the AUC is responsible for the majority of the following atrocities:
the forced displacement of more than two million Colombians from
their homes and land; massacres that have taken the lives of thousands
of peasants over the past few years (there were more than 400 massacres
in 2000 alone); the assassination of more than 3,800 union leaders
over the past 15 years without a single culprit ever being convicted.
While the paramilitaries are the principal perpetrators of these
human rights abuses, many of them have been committed with the collaboration,
and sometimes direct participation, of the U.S.-backed Colombian
military.