October 14, 2002

Telling Half-Truths

by Garry Leech

The story of the ongoing conflict in Colombia as told by administration officials in Washington has been a tale of half-truths. The U.S. public has been presented with certain facts intended to portray the conflict in a light considered desirable by the Bush White House. While such misinformation strategies were utilized throughout the Cold War and the "war on drugs," they have escalated dramatically since 9-11 as part of a propaganda campaign that seeks to justify expanding the "war on terrorism" to include Colombia. The perpetrators of this misinformation have clearly abdicated their moral responsibility with regards to providing the U.S. public with all the relevant facts pertaining to the true nature of terrorism in Colombia.

Timely and politically motivated statements made by U.S. government officials following the September 11 attacks laid the groundwork for Washington's recent military escalation in Colombia. Within a month of the attacks against New York, Washington DC and Pennsylvania, the U.S. State Department's top counterterrorism official, Francis X. Taylor, stated that Colombia's largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), "is the most dangerous international terrorist group based in this hemisphere."

Shortly after Taylor's declaration, Democratic Senator Bob Graham of Florida followed suit by implying that Colombia should be the principal battlefield in the war against terrorism. According to Graham, there were some 500 incidents of terrorism committed worldwide against U.S. citizens and interests in the year 2000, and "Of those almost 500 incidents, 44 percent were in one country. Was that country Egypt? No. Israel? No. Afghanistan? Hardly a tick. Forty-four percent were in Colombia. That's where the terrorist war has been raging."

Graham deliberately preyed on the public's post-September 11 fears by carefully phrasing his statement to insinuate that Colombian "terrorists" are a direct threat to the United States. He used these statistics as justification for escalating U.S. military involvement in Colombia's civil conflict (see, Targeting Colombia’s "Evil-doers"). But despite the fact that there were indeed hundreds of attacks against U.S. interests by Colombia's leftist rebel groups, the Florida senator's statement was only a half-truth.

Among the facts that Graham conveniently neglected to mention was that the United States itself has never been attacked by Colombia's guerrillas, nor is there any likelihood of any such an attack occurring. Also, every attack against U.S. interests by Colombian rebels has occurred in Colombia and U.S. citizens were rarely the victims. Finally, Graham failed to point out that virtually all of the attacks against the United States by Colombian guerrillas have consisted of bombing oil pipelines used by U.S. companies, particularly Occidental Petroleum.

Graham's irresponsible insinuation that Colombia's guerrillas are of the same ilk as al Qaeda and other truly international terrorist groups succeeded in laying the groundwork for Washington's recent military escalation in Colombia as part of the war on terrorism. In the past few months, the Bush administration has removed conditions that restricted U.S. military aid to counternarcotics operations, allowing three U.S.-trained Colombian army battalions and dozens of Blackhawk and Huey helicopters to now be used for counterinsurgency operations against leftist rebels. The White House has also dispatched U.S. Army Special Forces troops to eastern Colombia as part of a new $94 million counterterrorism aid package intended to provide the Colombian army with training and helicopter gunships to be used against the rebels in order to protect Occidental Petroleum's oil pipeline. In reality, this counterterrorism aid package is little more than a U.S. taxpayer subsidy of a U.S. corporation's risky foreign business investment.

Bush administration officials have been extremely selective about what facts they disseminate with regards to terrorism in Colombia. The focus has been almost exclusively on Colombia's leftist guerrilla groups on the State Department's List of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. There has been little mention of the right-wing paramilitary death squads that are also on the State Department's terrorist list and are closely-allied with the U.S.-backed Colombian military. In other words, the White House has ignored the fact that it is indirectly supporting one Colombian terrorist group in order to target another. But this is nothing new. In fact, it is exactly the same strategy the Bush administration used to attack Afghanistan last year when it befriended a military dictatorship in Pakistan that supported Kashmiri terrorists in order to target Bin Laden's terrorist organization. The predictable consequences of this strategy became evident last week when a coalition of anti-U.S. and pro-Taliban Islamic parties won an unexpectedly large number of seats in Pakistan's parliamentary election.

Half-truths were also utilized by Washington and Bogotá—and echoed by the mainstream media—as a means of portraying the FARC as responsible for the collapse of Colombia's peace process last February. Following 9-11, officials in Washington and Bogotá soon realized that shifting the focus from the FARC's involvement in the drug trade to the rebel group's place on the State Department's foreign terrorist list would dramatically increase the possibilities of escalating the U.S. military role in Colombia's civil conflict. The U.S. public was presented with official statements declaring that the FARC was using its safe-haven to increase its military strength and that the rebel group's continuing "terrorist" attacks outside the demilitarized zone showed it was not serious about negotiating a cease-fire.

While many of the accusations leveled against the FARC were true, again they only represented half of the truth (see, The Hypocrisy of the Peace Process). The FARC did indeed increase its military strength during the three-year peace process, but so did the Colombian military under a $1.3 billion U.S. aid package that made Colombia the world's third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid behind only Israel and Egypt. But while many government officials were keen to point out that the FARC's military build-up during the peace process clearly illustrated that the rebels were negotiating in bad faith, there was no such accusations made against the Colombian government, which was implementing the exact same strategy under Plan Colombia.

Bush administration officials also repeatedly pointed out that the FARC's continuing attacks outside of the safe-haven showed that the rebels were not serious about negotiating a cease-fire. Again, the other half of this truth was rarely mentioned: That the Colombian military and its paramilitary allies were also continuing with their own military operations throughout the country. Furthermore, the agreement under which the peace process was being conducted did not call for the cessation of military operations anywhere outside of the safe-haven. Therefore, the FARC, whose military tactics may have failed to win the hearts and minds of the Colombian people, were not violating any agreement by continuing to wage war.

Perhaps the most-ignored facts relating to the Colombian government and the FARC's failure to reach a cease-fire were the tragic legacy resulting from the last cease-fire accord signed by Bogotá and the rebel group in the mid-1980s. In 1985, the FARC signed a cease-fire agreement with President Belisario Betancur and agreed to form a political party, the Patriotic Union, in order to participate in the political process. Within five years, paramilitary death squads had killed more than 2,000 members of the Patriotic Union, including three presidential candidates and four elected congressmen.

As a result, it should come as little surprise that the FARC were reluctant to agree to a cease-fire under President Andres Pastrana's peace process as long as the paramilitaries still existed. The fact that during negotiations the FARC repeatedly demanded that the paramilitaries be dismantled was no trivial matter to the rebel group. However, not only were the paramilitary death squads not dismantled by President Pastrana, their numbers actually increased at a record pace during his four years in office. An ironic fact when one considers that Washington hawks repeatedly led the U.S. public to believe that Pastrana was too soft in his dealings with Colombia's guerrillas.

Since 9-11, the half-truths emanating from Washington have increased dramatically, especially regarding the so-called Colombian terrorist threat. The mainstream media have also displayed even less backbone than usual with regards to questioning the motives and tactics of the Bush administration. It is clear that the White House is using the "war on terrorism" as justification for implementing both domestic and foreign policies that would not have been tolerated before September 11. The fact that many of these policies are now being implemented is testament to the effectiveness of a well-orchestrated Bush administration propaganda campaign that relies on continually feeding half-truths to the U.S. public.

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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