Colombia: Old Domino’s New Clothes

There are moments in American foreign policy that run a
déjà vu chill down one’s spine. Just such a moment was
the recent talk to a group of Cali businessmen by
William Wood, U.S. Ambassador to Colombia. In his
remarks, Wood endorsed efforts by the present
government of President Alvaro Uribe to overturn that
country’s constitution to permit himself a second term.
"The U.S. Constitution permits presidential re-
elections," Wood argued, "that’s why we don’t see this
proposal as anti-democratic."

Wood’s remark harks back to the dark old days
when the U.S. routinely intervened in Latin
America, overthrowing governments and
constitutions from Guatemala to Brazil.

In fact, the Uribe government’s pursuit of military
victory in Colombia’s four-decade-old civil war has
spawned a host of undemocratic measures, a human rights
crisis, and the threat that the war might spill over
into neighboring Venezuela.

While the Bush Administration argues human rights has
improved under Uribe, trade unionists and human rights
advocates disagree.

Two years ago, the United Nations Commission on
Human Rights found "massive and systematic
violations of (human) rights" and recommended
24 initiatives the Colombian government should
take. According to human rights advocates,
those steps have not been taken.

"The Uribe government has moved backwards on the UN
recommendations," says Richard Howitt, a member of
the European Parliament and foreign policy and
human rights spokesperson for the European Labor
Party.

While mass murders and kidnappings have declined, 20
percent and 32 percent respectively, targeted
killings and disappearances of unionists and left
opposition supporters have increased.

Disappearances have increased from 258 in the
1994-95 period, to more than 1,200 a year since
2001.

In the past 10 years, more than 3,000 trade
unionists have been murdered, almost all at the
hands of the Colombian Army or the right-wing
paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia
(AUC). According to Human Rights watch, "There is
detailed, abundant and compelling evidence of
continuing close ties" between the two.

The most controversial of the new anti-terror
legislation is Uribe’s plan to "demobilize" the AUC
and allow the paramilitaries to buy their way out of
trouble. "Rather than serving time in prison," says
Colombian Peace Commissioner Luis Carlos Restrepo,
"there are alternative sentences and the individuals
will be allowed to pay reparations."

Human rights organizations contemptuously refer to the
plan as "checkbook immunity."

The Bush Administration has endorsed the process, even
though AUC founder, Carlos Castano, has already been
convicted in absentia for murder and drug dealing. The
other AUC leader, Salvatore Mancuso, is a former
associate of Medellin cocaine cartel chief, Pablo
Escobar. Both are wanted by the US and Interpol for
shipping over 17 tons of cocaine to Europe between 1997
and 2002.

This past November the government "demobilized" 856
members of a supposed AUC unit in Medellin. But
according to Andy Webb-Vidal of the Financial Times,
most of the "paras" were petty criminals and young
unemployed men rounded up the night before in 28
government buses.

Human rights groups were outraged. "Instead of handing
these criminals a microphone, the government should be
concentrating on arresting them and bringing them to
justice," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director
of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch.

While the Bush Administration officially
considers the AUC a "terrorist organization," in
practice U.S. aid has targeted only the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)
and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN).

FARC, and to a lesser extent the ELN, do engage in
assassinations and kidnappings and levy "taxes" on the
drug trade. But, according to human rights groups, 85
percent of the civilian deaths in Colombia occur at
the hands of the armed forces or the paramilitaries.

Colombia is now the third largest recipient of
U.S. foreign aid, after Israel and Egypt. With
that aid the Colombian army has added 35,000
troops, becoming increasingly mobile with its
fleet of U.S. supplied helicopters. The U.S.
has just helped deploy one Colombian combat
battalion and is training another.

Colombia also has the largest US embassy in the
world, and more than 20 US-based companies share
$178 million per year in contracts. All total, the
US has sent more than $3 billion in aid since Plan
Colombia began in 2000, the great bulk of it to the
police and the military.

Much of the war has been privatized, with huge
arms corporations like Lockheed Martin, Northrop
Grumman, and TRW providing security forces,
surveillance of insurgent movements, and drug
interdiction. This privatization has allowed the
companies to avoid having to answer to the U.S.
Congress.

"My complaint about the use of private
contractors," says U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL)
is their ability to fly under the radar to avoid
accountability."

Few observers think government forces can win a
military victory, in large part because the
conditions that ignited the war back in the late
’60s have never been addressed by the Colombian
government or the country’s elite.

Between 65 and 68 percent of Colombia’s people live in
poverty, and 30 percent of the landowners control 95
percent of the land. "The land problem is at the
center of the armed conflict," says refugee advocate
Jorge Rojas.

But instead of urging land reform and solutions to
growing economic inequality in the country, the U.S.
has turned the conflict into a war against terrorism
and drugs.

A recent study by the Council on Foreign Relations,
however, called US policy in Colombia and the Andes
region "myopic," arguing that the US’s focus on drugs
in Colombia was "no longer sustainable."

Rather than reconsidering policies that are
increasingly under fire in the region, the Bush
Administration has ratcheted up the rhetoric.

US Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL), chair of the powerful House
International Relations Committee, said of Colombia
that "three hours by plane from Miami, we face a
potential breeding ground for international terror
equaled perhaps only by Afghanistan."

Former US Ambassador to Colombia, Curtis Kamman,
told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on
Technology, Terrorism and Government that "The
terrorists who operate in Colombia have not
explicitly declared the United States to be their
target. But their political and economic objectives
are incompatible with our values, and they could
ultimately represent a force of evil no less
troublesome than al Qaeda."

The possibility that war could spread into
neighboring countries appears very real. The Bush
Administration has long hinted that populist
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is supporting FARC
and the ELT.

Chavez fell afoul of the White House when he thawed
relations between Venezuela and Cuba. But the Bush
Administration declared virtual war on Chavez when he
insisted on trying to re-negotiate 60-year old oil
agreements with foreign oil producers. Venezuela has 77
billion barrels of oil and is the US’s fourth largest
supplier. The Andes region as a whole supplies the US
with 20 percent of its energy needs.

Venezuela, like Colombia, is mired in poverty and
economic inequality. Some 80 percent of its
population live in poverty, and 2 percent of the
population controls 60 percent of the land.
Rising oil revenues would go a long way toward
alleviating some of those conditions.

There are some recent ominous developments.

On Jan. 23, the U.S. State Department coordinator
for counter terrorism, Cofer Black, warned
Venezuela that it was not doing enough in the
global campaign against terrorism.

The Uribe government recently sent three brigades of
troops to the Venezuelan border, and one Colombian
Defense Department official told the Financial Times
that because of the tense domestic situation in
Venezuela, Chavez will "look to a confrontation with
Colombia."

There is no evidence that Venezuela wants a fight
with Colombia---Venezuela’s population is 24
million to Colombia’s 44 million---but there may be
domestic reasons for Uribe to spread the war.

While the Colombian government has made gains
on the battlefield, the rising cost of the war
and the growing opposition to the loss of
political freedoms have begun to sour the
nation on Uribe’s "Democratic Security."

While news polls---always suspect in a media dominated
by the nation’s elite---indicate 80 percent support for
Uribe, facts on the ground suggest the support is not
all that deep.

A recent nationwide government-sponsored referendum to
increase the powers of the executive and raise military
spending went down to defeat, and voters in Bogota
elected a left-wing former union leader, Luis Garzon,
Mayor. The mayoralty of the country’s largest city has
long been considered a springboard to the national
presidency.

The worry is that Uribe, egged on by an aggressive Bush
Administration and his own military, might invade
Venezuela on the pretext of attacking "guerilla havens"
in the border region. If he did, it would lift a page
from another war.

In April 1970, frustrated on the battlefield and
chasing the illusion of military victory, the U.S. and
South Vietnamese invaded Cambodia, plunging that
country into a war that would eventually lead to the
killing fields of Pol Pot. It also destabilized nations
throughout the region.

Déjà vu all over again?

Conn Hallinan is a provost at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, a lecturer in journalism, and
an analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus. He can be
contacted at connm@ucsc.edu