Drug War Masks U.S. Aid to Thugs

Anyone wanting a vivid snapshot of the rubble of U.S. policy toward Latin America should look at Colombia, where the Clinton administration now has one foot over the brink of a military intervention strongly reminiscent of John F. Kennedy’s initial deployments in Vietnam in the early 1960s.

Colombia is in economic free fall, and the only comfort its beleaguered inhabitants can seize upon is that the velocity of this collapse is at least slower than that of neighboring Ecuador, now experiencing its worst economic slump in 70 years. Colombia is currently suffering negative growth and has an official unemployment rate of 19%, with the actual unemployment rate probably more than twice that. Austerity programs administered by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have closed off any hope for that half of the country’s population that lives below the poverty line.

It shouldn’t be this way. With a diversity of exports, Colombia could have one of the strongest economies of Latin America. But it’s the same old story. Down the years, every U.S. administration has sent arms and advisors to prop up Colombia’s elites. U.S.-assisted repression in Colombia has been spectacularly appalling. According to the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, in Colombia, 3,832 political murders were perpetrated in 1998, the bulk of them carried out by the army, police and right-wing paramilitary groups. To lend perspective, this is about twice the death toll in Kosovo that prompted charges of Serbian genocide and that helped whip up sentiment for NATO’s war on Serbia.

The U.S. government is now preparing to escalate vastly the money and weapons going to the Colombian military, far beyond the $289 million already scheduled this year, making Colombia the third-largest recipient of American aid, after Israel and Egypt. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, is asking for an extra $1 billion for the drug war, said sum to go to the Andean countries, with about half to Colombia alone. His request puts an end to any pretense that there is somehow a distinction between U.S. backing of counterinsurgency and counterdrug activities.

The immediate cause of panic is the strength of Colombia’s main insurgency, run by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In a peace feeler earlier this year, Colombia’s President Andres Pastrana effectively ceded the FARC control over a 16,000-square-mile slab of south-central Colombia, which is about the size of Switzerland. The Clinton administration was not entirely unsympathetic to this overture, though it outraged Colombia’s traditional elites and also the military, which feels humiliated by guerrilla strength that brought FARC forces as close as 25 miles from Bogota in July.

For its part, FARC’s leaders have plainly questioned whether Pastrana has the ability to deliver on any negotiated settlement. Not without reason. Every single guerrilla group agreeing to lay down its arms and enter the conventional political arena has seen its members slaughtered by the paramilitary groups controlled by the army and the police.

There is a powerful lobby in Washington for pouring money into counterinsurgency in Colombia. McCaffrey explicitly disavows any distinction between counterinsurgency and the drug war, and Colombia’s police commander, Rosso Jose Serrano, has forged close links with Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.), who, respectively, head the Foreign Relations committees considering these requests for big new appropriations to the Colombian military. Already, the Pentagon is sending planes and personnel into Colombia. The U.S. Army’s intelligence-gathering De Havilland RC-7 that crashed into a Colombian mountain July 23 was almost certainly monitoring FARC deployments.

There are two faces to U.S. policy toward Latin America, both repulsive. The first is that of economic liberalism, preaching the virtues of uninhibited trade, open markets, privatization, structural adjustment. On the ground, across Latin America, we see the consequence: social devastation in 31 kleptocracies, all corrupt, many bankrupt.

The alternate face, whose fierce glare is now fixed upon Colombia, is that of military repression. For 30 years, the U.S. underwrote genocide in Guatemala. With 36,000 civilians already killed, Colombia could fast become its successor, unless the U.S. Congress turns this evil back.