Pubdate: Thu, 16 Aug 2001
Source: Register-Guard, The (OR)
Copyright: 2001 The Register-Guard
Contact:  http://www.registerguard.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/362
Author: Alexander Cockburn
Note: Column appears in print only

VIOLENCE IN COLOMBIA A GOOD OLD-FASHIONED COUNTERINSURGENCY WAR

The war in Colombia isn't about drugs. It's about the annihilation of 
popular uprisings by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia 
(FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerilla groups, or 
Indian peasants fending off the ravages of oil companies, cattle 
barons and mining firms. A good old-fashioned counterinsurgency war, 
designed to clear the way for American corporations to set up shop in 
Colombia, with cocaine as the scare tactic.

Last year, the U.S. Air Force commissioned the Santa Monica-based 
RAND think tank to prepare a review of the situation in Colombia. In 
early June, RAND (progenitor of many a blood sodden scenario in the 
Vietnam era) submitted its 130 page report, called "The Colombian 
Labyrinth: The Synergy of Drugs and Insurgency and its Implications 
for Regional Stability."

RAND'S conclusion? The United States needs to step up its military 
involvement in Colombia and quit forfeiting options by limiting its 
operations to counter-narcotics raids. Along the way, the report 
makes a number of astonishing admissions about the paramilitaries and 
their links to the drug trade, about human rights abuses by the 
U.S.-trained Colombian military and about the irrationality of crop 
fumigation.

The RAND report addresses the horrifying level of "social intolerance 
killings," which, for men ages 14 to 44, reached a level of 394 
deaths per 100,000 last year. In all, Colombia endures 30,000 annual 
murders -- double the number for the entire U.S. in 1998. Slightly 
more than 23,000 murders have been linked to "illegal armed 
organizations" since 1988.

The implication is the FARC guerilla group is responsible for these 
killings, and one has to dig deep into the RAND analysis to discover 
otherwise. In fact, according to statistics compiled by the 
government, about 3,500 people were killed by the guerillas, and 
19,652 by paramilitaries and "private justice" groups working in 
concert with the Colombian military.

The overall commander of the 19 paramilitary "fronts" is a sadistic 
scoundrel named Carlos Castano, who supervises a killing program 
right off the pages of the CIA's Phoenix Program's operations manual. 
The RAND report details how Castano's forces routinely execute 
"suspected guerilla sympathizers" in order "to instill fear and 
compel support among the local population."

When that strategy fails to deliver, the AUC simply launches an 
all-out attack on the villages and slaughters the inhabitants. RAND 
dispassionately notes the AUC justifies these atrocities, even Bob 
Kerrey might admire, as a legitimate way to "remove the guerillas' 
supply network."

Although 20 pages are devoted to discussion of the FARC's ties to the 
drug trade, the RAND report spends only a single paragraph on the 
links of the paramilitaries and the narco-traffickers. But this 
paragraph is as damaging as it is brief. RAND grudgingly admits that 
Castano's group derives "a considerable extent" of its income from 
the drug trade and notes that eight of the AUC's 19 death squads also 
serve as protection gangs for the cocaine industry.

Castano himself has boasted to CNN's International Division of his 
relationship with the drug lords. He said that 70 percent of the 
funds for the AUC come from the drug trade, with the remaining 30 
percent, the RAND report notes in a stark parenthesis, "coming 
largely from extortion."

The Colombian government under Andres Pastrana (though not the 
Colombian generals) takes the public position that the paramilitaries 
are at least as big of a threat as the FARC and the ELN, and is 
moving, rhetorically, at least, to supress them. RAND condemns this 
approach as "unwise and shortsighted." Better, RAND concludes, to 
mimic the Peruvian or Guatemalan counterinsurgency models and fashion 
the death squads into "a supervised network of self-defense 
organizations."

RAND calmly ridicules the requirement for human rights training and 
monitoring, which is attached to the U.S. aid package. "There is a 
question of the practical limitations on the Colombian government's 
ability to prevent human rights violations in the context of an armed 
insurrection, the RAND analysts contend. To buttress this assessment, 
RAND points to the United States' experience in Vietnam, arguing that 
the slaughter of civilians is simply a cost of doing business during 
wartime and that "even with disciplined troops, the chain of command 
will ultimately break down at times under the stress of combat."

Of course, most of the U.S. massacres in Vietnam were the result of 
soldiers carrying out official policy, and not the actions of crazed 
grunts going on killing sprees. The same is true in Colombia.

RAND concludes that the only solution is the elimination of the 
threat to the "stability" of the region posed by the FARC and the 
ELN. The report also suggests that if the United States doesn't 
intervene, the Colombian situation "will metasticize into a wider 
regional upheaval." It is up to the United States to act as the "deus 
ex machina" in this conflict.

Aside from stepping up direct military aid to Colombia, RAND urges 
the Pentagon to expand the U.S. military presence in the bordering 
nations as well, including "helping Panama fill the security vacuum 
in its southern provinces."

Remember that the firm of Cheney, Powell and Rumsfeld has lately 
reassembled the old gang that directed such misery in Latin America 
during the 1980s: John Negroponte, Otto Reich and Elliot Abrams. 
Marcella approvingly invokes the Thatcherite English theorist John 
Dunn: "There cannot be political control without the capacity to 
coerce."
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