August 19, 2002

The Changing Contours of Combat

by Patricia Dahl

The 1960 U.S. Special Forces Manual and Guideline's admission of military and paramilitary collusion is artlessly cavalier. "The military was assigned the primary responsibility . . . in the guerrilla/terrorist suppression campaign," with support from indigenous "police, paramilitary units, and civil agencies." The manual's guidelines elude moral and ethical demands regarding the conduct of counterinsurgency units, and go so far as to extol the employment of terror as utilitarian, efficacious, and above the law. To reduce the chances of there being any lingering "threats nibbling away at the periphery of the Free World", to use Kennedy's famous phrase. The Journal of World Affairs elaborated this solution with unalloyed candor: "In reality, death squads are an extremely effective tool, however odious, in combating terrorism and revolutionary challenges." El Salvador was cited as a successful case in point. Mass murder "played the most significant role in defeating an organized terrorist challenge." The terrorist challenge in question was handily defined: "Of the more than 15,000 victims . . . nearly all were leftists or relatives of left-wing activists."

Decreasing the number of U.S. expeditionary forces was a stratagem learned from the Vietnam years, largely out of necessity. Popular disaffection with the war and massive defense spending caused resentment in the years after the 1950's Organization Man began losing its hold on the domestic imagination, creating internal fault lines of its own. Under Kennedy's ideological zeal, Pentagon strategists began honing formulas for unconventional warfare that included utilizing mercenary troops. But Kennedy's serial deployment of advisors and other personnel, and Johnson's subsequent escalation from 100,000 to 500,000 troops, failed to advance these formulas from theory to practice.

By January 25, 1969, Secretary of Defense Clark M. Clifford briefed Congress on something of a corrective restructuring plan: "Clearly, the overriding goal of our collective defense efforts in Asia must be to assist our allies in building a capability to defend themselves. Besides costing less (an Asian soldier costs about 1/15 as much as his American counterpart) there are compelling political and psychological advantages on both sides." A nebulous, less costly U.S. involvement stood to tamp down burgeoning oppositions on overseas soil.

In retrospect, these stark accounts stand as emblems of a more "innocent" time. By June of that same year, 1969, Nixon began to manifest patterns of speech that obfuscated and euphemized policy developments for the general public. While addressing a spontaneously assembled group of reporters at the Top of the Mar Hotel in Guam, he divulged that the U.S. would leave the primary defense of Asia to its allies, while limiting its own considerable military might to the required support functions. The meeting was reported to have confused the journalists, perhaps doubly so when they were forbidden to leak direct quotes. The White House then supported the Guam Message (renamed later by Nixon as the Nixon Doctrine) as "a major shift in U.S. foreign policy." By 1970, Nixon's report to Congress elaborated with cautious minimalism: "In cases involving other types of aggression, we shall furnish military and economic assistance when requested and as appropriate. But we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower for its defense."

Nixon's plank, however, was hardly the elucidated policy of a subordinate, residual assistance to the hapless "directly threatened" nations his circumlocution suggested. After the journalists gathered in Guam scrambled to write copy on the meaning and role of support functions, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird intimated to the House Appropriations Committee what support functions were to look like: "The basic policy of decreasing direct U.S. military involvement cannot be successful unless we provide our friends and allies . . . with the material assistance necessary to insure the most effective possible contribution by the manpower they are willing and able to commit . . .this means indigenous manpower organized into properly equipped and well-trained armed forces with the help of material, training, technology and specialized military skills furnished by the United States." Mining the vast, cost-effective indigenous resource and populations in order to cloak U.S. presence was to graduate its presence exponentially.

The result was decades of hegemonic control fortified by rending nations "directly threatened" with methods of combat known as unconventional warfare, characterized by "control of movement of civilians, rendering civilian cooperation with our forces desirable, eliminating guerrilla sources of supply, the holding of hostages, reprisals against civilians, punitive expeditions . . . means must be devised to remove any guerilla logistic support, to alienate the civilian population from the guerrillas, to isolate the underground, and to prevent support of them by air, sea, or land."

During the Reagan years, these methods were further articulated as low-intensity warfare. Since the official profile of that term includes coercive diplomacy, psychological operations, police actions and limited use of force ("limited" meaning no formal troop incursion) or even just the threat of its use, it becomes necessary to ask, low-intensity for whom? In the case of Colombia, where current paramilitary action and its "support functions" have gained international notoriety, it is helpful to know how these actions pinion and immiserate oceanic numbers of Colombian innocents.

Prepped by U.S. military training curricula, personnel from armies interchangeably called mercenary, proxy, or paramilitary, are domesticated to techniques of terror that include skinning, dismembering with chainsaws, and beheading, so much a frequent method of slaying that paramilitaries have earned the nickname mochacabezas, meaning "head-hackers." Use of this terror "controls the movement of citizens" either by deliberately displacing them, or by penetrating every sanctuary of their daily life.

Unlike the guerrillas who must maneuver with degrees of circumspection and stealth, paramilitaries operate in the open and mingle freely with police, army, and local populations. In the rare cases an arrest is made, the paramilitaries are soon released. In the even rarer cases paramilitaries are charged, it is with a minor offense such as carrying a gun or communications equipment. The paramilitaries ratify their own laws according to personal predilection. Social directives such as setting curfews or hours for conducting business, establishing proper lengths of men's hair or the correct method of sweeping the front stoop, are considered items of legitimate jurisdiction, and are ruthlessly enforced. If there are conflicts within families, paramilitaries arbitrate them, acting out as self-described "ombudsmen".

The Officina Femina Popular reports a backlash against women as they increasingly speak out against the machismo that propels war. One response by the paramilitaries is to dictate the appropriate length of women's skirts. If after receiving two warnings, a woman persists in deviating from this standard, payment for that infraction is death and the river is her grave. Rape, de rigueur of all war, is rampant. The rule of combat that ensures control over a community is incontestable: for the combatants, the field of flesh owned by half of the population is simply theirs for the occupying.

The mounting outcry over these actions forced both the U.S. and Colombian governments to promulgate denunciation against them. On September 10, 2001, the U.S. State Department formerly defined the paramilitaries as terrorists. What is disturbing, however, is under much fanfare about human rights progress by the Pastrana and Bush administrations, tolerance for the swelling numbers of abuse cases remain elastic. Paramilitary operations involving civil control and patronage are on the upsurge, proving their confluence with the military and the police has extended to other organs of state.

In mandatory monthly meetings, they force locals to itemize their assets and pay taxes on them. Not only are illegal industries like drug processing and gasoline extraction under their control, but access to legal jobs, assignation of jobs, and the lists of people who receive humanitarian aid regarding fumigation also fall into their realm of regulation. The trajectory from meting out corporeal terror to influencing the larger political sphere suggests a stratagem, like the one following the experience of Vietnam, is being developed from necessity.

The Human Rights Office at the United Nations reports that paramilitary centralization in urban areas is also increasing. There, they manipulate the compilation of statistics for homicide by shipping the bodies of political victims to the countryside where they are not tallied. This past July, the front pages of Barrancabermeja's daily newspaper printed an account of the paramilitaries' brazen censoring of the press: "If you do not stop playing with the people's pain, then we will show you what pain is." The headline and subsequent text elicited no response from any functionary of the law.

It is easy to see that all vestiges of the Pastrana "peace" platform have been aborted and that nascent structural shifts, more cynical in form, are taking their place. Months before the presidential election, paramilitaries rallied town locals to lead chants of support for Uribe. On the day of election, civic transportation services were canceled with no discernible objection by local or federal government bodies. Paramilitaries then used these vehicles to "escort" people to voting halls. In many cases, voters were given two ballots, one blank and one "sample" ballot already marked. What they soon discovered was that if they submitted the sample ballot already marked, they were paid. While it is true that despite these strenuous efforts of electoral engineering, Uribe won the election with a scant 5.8 million vote count out of Colombia's 42 million people. It is also estimated that 30 percent of congressional seats were won by candidates affiliated with the paramilitaries.

As part of the new platform, Uribe states his intent to welcome the paramilitaries at the negotiating table, regardless of the fact that political status has never been conferred on them, even decorously, as it was on the guerrillas. Despite legal charges against him, and a bounty on his head, uncapturable, media friendly, paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño, seized another communications opportunity early this spring. In a retreat from his former missive revealing 70 percent of paramilitary income is derived from drug profits, his latest indicates the paramilitaries will now cease operations with drug traffickers, leading many to speculate that other, more formidable sources of income are now funneling their way to the illegal militia.

As the trend to vest the paramilitaries with greater political control becomes more obvious, the policy following Nixon's talk at the Mar Hotel in Guam, advising that decreasing "direct" involvement cannot be successful without "technical assistance" or "support functions" still rings true. However, unlike that erstwhile, more "innocent" time, words extolling the use of "death squads" to exterminate "leftists" and their loved ones no longer find the light of day. The "technical assistance" most apt, then, is propaganda control as detailed in military counterinsurgency manuals.

Cleaning up the image of the paramilitaries cannot be successful unless the images of their opponents, anyone whose ideas run counter to the neoliberal panorama, are sullied. Bias is institutionalized against human rights groups, social development advocates, labor organizers, intellectuals, and of course, the guerrillas, by distorted framework of the facts, ad hominem attack, quantitative reports of conflicts, of attacks and the details of their savagery.

Concurrently, military manuals themselves have been revised. Order 200-05/91, a classified document produced by the Colombian military following CIA and U.S. Military recommendations, now orders commanders to make "no written contracts with informants or civilian members of the network; everything must be agreed to orally . . .The study, selection, instruction, training, location and organization of these (paramilitary) networks will be covert and under the responsibility of division or brigade commanders . . ."

Today, even those revisions have an outdated ring. Practices of "unconventional warfare" spin an all too conventional yarn. Covert operations are so blatant and predictable, we are losing the very meaning of the term. Attempts to sanitize the record which has been proven again and again, in eye-witness accounts and in documented reports, provide no viable pretexts. To imbue the paramilitaries with a veneer of legitimacy in order to cloak their presence, and their terror, is to graduate their terror exponentially.

It is said that the first casualty of war is truth. Whoever owns the medium for information, wins the war. On Monday, July 15, 2002, the New York Times interpreted for us a new interpretation of the conflict: "A group of Colombian leaders and local officials called on the Unites States government yesterday to grant temporary asylum to Colombians who fear returning to their native country, where guerrilla fighters and the army have clashed for decades in a bloody civil war." It's official. Mark your calendars. Hold fast to all you know, anterior and posterior to this date. An examination of the record shows: the paramilitaries and their brutal acts have now been "disappeared."

Patricia Dahl is member of the Colombia Support Network in New York.

This article originally appeared in Colombia Report, an online journal that was published by the Information Network of the Americas (INOTA).

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