Colombia – Part One of Two
By Noam Chomsky

In 1999, Colombia became the leading recipient of US military and police
assistance, replacing Turkey (Israel and Egypt are in a separate category).
The figure is scheduled to increase sharply for the next two years. Through
the 1990s, Colombia has been the leading recipient of US military aid in
Latin America, and has also compiled the worst human rights record, in
accord with a well-established correlation.

We can often learn from systematic patterns, so let us tarry for a moment on
the previous champion, Turkey. It has received substantial military aid from
the origins of the Cold War, as a major US outpost. But arms deliveries
began to increase sharply in 1984, with no Cold War connection at all.
Rather, that was the year when Turkey began a large-scale counterinsurgency
campaign in the largely Kurdish southeast. Arms deliveries peaked in 1997,
exceeding the total from the entire period 1950-1983 (fiscal years),
amounting to about 80% of Turkish military equipment, including heavy
armaments (jet planes, tanks, etc). By 1999, Turkey had largely suppressed
Kurdish resistance by terror and ethnic cleansing, leaving some 2-3 million
refugees, 3500 villages destroyed (7 times Kosovo under NATO bombs), and
tens of thousands killed. A huge flow of arms from the Clinton
administration was no longer needed to accomplish these objectives.

Nevertheless, despite the great success achieved by some of the most extreme
state terror of the 1990s, military operations continue while Kurdish
citizens are still deprived of even minimal rights (again, a regime much
harsher than Kosovo under Milosevic). On April 1, 10,000 Turkish troops
began new ground sweeps in regions that had been devastated by the
US-Turkish terror campaigns of the preceding years, also launching another
offensive into northern Iraq to attack Kurdish guerrilla forces -- in a
no-fly zone where Kurds are protected by the US air force from the
(temporarily) wrong oppressor. As these new campaigns were beginning,
Secretary of Defense William Cohen addressed the American-Turkish Council, a
festive occasion with much laughter and applause, according to the
government report. He praised Turkey for taking part in the humanitarian
bombing of Yugoslavia, apparently without embarrassment, and announced that
Turkey had been invited to join in co-production of the new Joint Strike
Aircraft, just as it has been co-producing the F-16s that it used to such
good effect in approved varieties of ethnic cleansing and atrocities within
its own territory, as a loyal member of NATO.

In Colombia, however, the military armed and trained by the US has not
crushed domestic resistance, though it continues to produce its regular
annual toll of atrocities. Each year, some 300,000 new refugees are driven
from their homes, with a death toll of about 3000 and many horrible
massacres. The great majority of atrocities are attributed to the
paramilitary forces that are closely linked to the military, as documented
once again by Human Rights Watch (February 2000). The Colombian Commission
of Jurists reported last September that the rate of killings had increased
by almost 20% over the preceding year, and that the proportion attributable
to the paramilitaries had risen from 46% in 1995 to almost 80% in 1998,
continuing through 1999. Forced displacement in 1998 was 20% above 1997, and
increased in 1999 in some regions according to Human Rights Watch. Colombia
now has the largest displaced population in the world, after Sudan and
Angola. Prominent human rights activists continue to flee abroad under death
threats, including now the courageous head of the Church-based human rights
group Justice and Peace, Fr. Javier Giraldo, who has played an outstanding
role in defending human rights. The AFL-CIO reports (Feb. 2000) that several
trade unionists are murdered every week, mostly by paramilitaries supported
by the government security forces. Hailed as a leading democracy by Clinton
and other US leaders, Colombia permitted a challenge to the elite system of
power-sharing by an independent political party, which, however, faced
certain difficulties, such as the assassination of about 3000 activists,
including presidential candidates, mayors, and legislators. Meanwhile,
shameful socioeconomic conditions persist and may even have intensified,
leaving much of the population in misery in a rich country with
concentration of wealth and land-ownership that is high even by outrageous
Latin American standards.

The president of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights, former
Minister of Foreign Affairs Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, writes that it is
"poverty and insufficient land reform" that "have made Colombia one of the
most tragic countries of Latin America," though as elsewhere, "violence has
been exacerbated by external factors," primarily the initiatives of the
Kennedy Administration, which "took great pains to transform our regular
armies into counterinsurgency brigades," ushering in "what is known in Latin
America as the National Security Doctrine," which is not concerned with
"defense against an external enemy" but rather "the internal enemy." The new
"strategy of the death squads" accords the military "the right to fight and
to exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not
supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to be communist
extremists."

As part of its strategy of converting the Latin American military from
"hemispheric defense" to "internal security" -- meaning war against the
domestic population -- Kennedy dispatched a military mission to Colombia in
1962 headed by Special Forces General William Yarborough. He proposed
"reforms" to enable the security forces to "as necessary execute
paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist
proponents" -- the "communist extremists" to whom Vasquez Carrizosa alludes.

In Colombia, a governmental commission concluded that "the criminalization
of social protest" is one of the "principal factors which permit and
encourage violations of human rights" by the military and police authorities
and their paramilitary collaborators. Ten years ago, as US-backed state
terror was increasing sharply, the Minister of Defense called for "total war
in the political, economic, and social arenas," while another high military
official explained that guerrillas were of secondary importance: "the real
danger" is "what the insurgents have called the political and psychological
war," the war "to control the popular elements" and "to manipulate the
masses." The "subversives" hope to influence unions, universities, media,
and so on. "Every individual who in one or another manner supports the goals
of the enemy must be considered a traitor and treated in that manner," a
1963 military manual prescribed, as the Kennedy initiatives were moving into
high gear. Since the official goals of the guerrillas are social democratic
(whatever their actual goals may be), the circle of treachery targeted for
terror operations is wide.

The Kennedy-Yarborough strategy was developed and applied broadly in the
years that followed. Violent repression spread throughout the hemisphere,
reaching its awesome peak in Central America in the 1980s. Colombia's
advance to first-rank among the criminal states south of the border is in
part the result of the decline in US-backed state terror in Central America.
As in Turkey ten years later, its primary aims were achieved, leaving in its
wake a "culture of terror" that "domesticates the expectations of the
majority" and undermines any aspiration towards "alternatives that differ
from those of the powerful" in the words of Salvadoran Jesuits who learned
the lessons from bitter experience; those who survived the US assault, that
is. In Colombia, the problem of establishing approved forms of "stability"
remains, and is even becoming more severe. The correlation with increasing
arms shipments is familiar.