March 24, 2003

Worthy and Unworthy Victims in Colombia's War of Terror

by Doug Stokes

In the narratives of the world's global media corporations, familiar themes can be traced. One such theme that occurs time and again is the designation of worthy victims; poor unfortunates caught up in a spiral of violence. Invisible, however, are the unworthy victims; those poor unfortunates who have also been caught up in a spiral of violence, but due to the fact that their deaths do not lend weight to the narratives of the powerful, can be ignored. An example would be the Kurds in Northern Iraq. Worthy victims as long as their terrible suffering under Saddam suits the interests of the powerful. Meanwhile, their brothers and sisters across the border in Turkey are unworthy victims whose suffering is not only ignored by the powerful, but massively amplified by the flow of western arms to the Turkish government for use in its war against the country's Kurdish minority. This familiar pattern of worthy and unworthy victims is now being played out in Colombia, the world's third largest recipient of U.S. military aid and Washington's latest ally in its war of terror.

On February 7, a car bomb exploded at El Nogal, one of Colombia's elite clubs for the mega-rich. According to authorities, the bomb that devastated the building and killed 37 people was planted by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Latin America's largest and oldest guerrilla movement, although the rebel group recently denied responsibility for the bombing. While the death of these people has been rightly condemned, their deaths are also being weaved into a powerful narrative of worthy victims that justifies plans to further militarize Colombia and increase the bloodshed for the country's unnamed and unacknowledged unworthy victims: the poor and the displaced. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's immediate response to the bombing was to call for more U.S. military aid to fight the FARC. He stated bluntly, "Nations shouldn't ask Colombia to tolerate terrorism while the UN is deciding the matter of Iraq."

Uribe has also promised to carry out far reaching proposals to strengthen the longstanding U.S.-backed war of terror in Colombia by committing his administration to double the size of the Colombian military and create a new network of one million civilian informers to perform a counter-intelligence role. Prior to the El Nogal bombing Uribe had declared a state of "internal commotion" that allowed the Colombian state to prohibit public rallies and impose curfews. Fernando Londoño, Colombian Interior and Justice minister explained, "We all have to be aware that terror leads to extreme instability in Colombia. For this reason, the government has decided to declare a state of internal commotion."

On September 10, 2002, Uribe also passed his first military decree that has allowed for the creation of militarized Rehabilitation and Consolidation Zones. In these zones, direct military rule replaced existing local government rule and military forces were authorized to carry out arrests and conduct searches without warrants until Colombia's Constitutional Court ruled such activities unconstitutional on November 26 (see, Colombia Court Rules Rehabilitation Zones Unconstitutional).

Uribe is also pushing for tighter control of the Colombian media by passing laws which seek to restrict reporting on Colombia's "counter terrorist measures" with sentences of eight to twelve years in prison for anyone who publishes statistics considered "counterproductive to the fight against terrorism," as well as the possible "suspension" of the media outlet in question. These sanctions will apply to anybody who divulges, "reports that could hamper the effective implementation of military or police operations, endanger the lives of public forces personnel or private individuals," or commit other acts that undermine public order, "while boosting the position or image of the enemy." The innocent civilians caught up in the El Nogal bomb therefore have been added to a narrative of worthy victims that in turn lends further legitimacy for Uribe's new national security strategy.

But what of the unworthy victims? Colombia's military has one of the worst human rights records in the Western Hemisphere and has well documented and long standing ties to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a paramilitary group headed by Carlos Castaño. Although the AUC has sought to cast itself as an independent political actor, the U.S. State Department notes that the AUC is "a mercenary vigilante force, financed by criminal activities" and is the "the paid private" army of "narcotics traffickers or large landowners."

The collusion between the Colombian military and these private armies has led the human rights group Colombia Commission for Justice and Peace to label Colombian military and paramilitary forces "parastate" forces so as to diminish the alleged separation between these armed actors. This in turn is largely to counter the "triangulation" of Colombian violence that is regularly portrayed in mainstream international media, which portrays the Colombian military as a neutral arbiter between the armed left (the FARC) and the armed right (the AUC), when in fact the Colombian military and paramilitaries are two sides of the same counterinsurgency coin.

These parastate forces are responsible for over 80 percent of all human rights abuses in Colombia. In the last fifteen years, an entire democratic leftist political party was eliminated by right-wing paramilitaries. Some 4,000 activists were murdered in the 1980s and over 8,000 political assassinations were committed in Colombia in 2002 with 80 percent of these murders committed by paramilitary groups. Three out of four trade union activists murdered worldwide are killed by the Colombian paramilitaries, while 2.7 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes.

According to the UN, lecturers and teachers are "among the workers most often affected by killings, threats and violence-related displacement." Paramilitary groups also regularly target human rights activists, indigenous leaders, and community activists. This repression serves to criminalize any form of civil society resistance to the U.S.-led neo-liberal restructuring of Colombia's economy and to stifle political and economic challenges to the Colombian status quo. In defense of his paramilitary forces, Castaño argues that we "have always proclaimed that we are the defenders of business freedom and of the national and international industrial sectors." Amidst this repression over half of Colombia's population live in poverty according to the World Bank, with those most vulnerable being "children of all ages."

Talks between Uribe's government and the AUC are ongoing with Justice Minister Fernando Londoño stating that both sides "are working very sincerely." A regional commander of the AUC declared, "Uribe is like heaven compared to Pastrana." Gordon Sumner, the Reagan administration's special envoy to Latin America, outlined the best way to publicly incorporate the paramilitaries within the new civilian "counter terrorist" networks: "First, have them answer the law, cut out the drugs, and embrace human rights," then try to "bring them under the tent, to fight against the guerrillas, who are the biggest threat." He went on to note that in Colombia the "battle is never too crowded with friends."

Uribe's policies and his negotiations with the AUC—which recognizes them as a distinct political actor—have been endorsed by the Bush administration. Colin Powell has broadly supported Uribe's policies and argued that the United States is "firmly committed to President Uribe and his new national security strategy," with the Bush administration working "with our Congress to provide additional funding for Colombia."

Colombia's unworthy victims are the poor and displaced who are regularly targeted by state and parastate forces. Their deaths are far more numerous and far more dreadful due to the systematic manner in which they are killed while being completely ignored by the world's mainstream media. The El Nogal bombing, while terrible, is being used to influence international opinion, which in turn will increase the suffering of Colombia's "unworthy" victims and provide more U.S. funding for Uribe's militarization of Colombia under the pretext of Washington's global "war on terror."

Doug Stokes is an academic at Bristol University, UK. His research is on the continuity of post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy in the global South, in particular those policies that continue to lead to large-scale civilian suffering. He has published extensively on U.S. counterinsurgency in Latin America with a strong emphasis on Colombia. Read more of his work at www.dougstokes.net

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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