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American State Terrorism by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed |
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Written by Xiuhcoatl
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Nov 24, 2005 at 04:59 PM |
American State Terrorism
A Critical Review of The Objectives of U.S. Foreign Policy in The Post-World War II Period
Written by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
I. “Fundamental Values” of Policy
II. Pursuing “Fundamental Values” in Nicaragua
II.I The U.S. in Central America
II.II U.S. Support of the Somozan Dictatorship
II.III The Sandinista’s Revolution
II.IV The Context of U.S. Intervention in Nicaragua
II.V U.S. Backed Terrorism in Nicaragua
III.VI Post-Terror Conditions of Nicaragua
III. A Systematic Policy of Domination
III.I Making Chile Scream
III.II Invading Vietnam
IV. Post-Cold War Imperialism in Colombia
IV.I Slaughter in the Name of Democracy
IV.II Complicity of the State
IV.III U.S./Western Complicity in State Terror
IV.IV Brief History of the ‘War on Drugs’
V. World Order Under U.S./Western Hegemony
VI. Conclusion
I. “Fundamental Values” of Policy
“I believe we can have a foreign policy that is democratic, that is
based on fundamental values, and that uses power and influence, which
we have, for humane purposes… Our policy is based on an historical
vision of America’s role. Our policy is derived from a larger view of
global change. Our policy is rooted in our moral values, which never
change. Our policy is reinforced by our material wealth and by our
military power. Our policy is designed to serve mankind.”[1]
Contrary to this traditional perspective endorsed by then President of
the United States Jimmy Carter, the aims of U.S. foreign policy - which
has consistently dominated international relations in the post-war
period - were essentially to attain and enforce a global system in
which the Western powers under American leadership would maintain
global dominance. This essentially meant being in control of the
world’s resources at the expense of non-Western nations. This
fundamental objective of foreign policy in the post-war period is
candidly indicated by a notorious declassified top-secret report
produced by the U.S. State Department’s policy planning staff, headed
at the time (February 1948) by George Kennan:
“We have about 50 per cent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 per cent
of its population... Our real task in the coming period is to devise a
pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position
of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do
so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming…
We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford the luxury of altruism
and world-benefaction... We should cease to talk about vague and...
unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living
standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we will
have to deal in straight power concepts.”[2]
Both American and British military interventions, often in terms of a
joint effort, were accordingly undertaken in the attempt to establish
and maintain this global “pattern of relationships”. These have been
well documented by foreign policy analysts, and certain significant
aspects of them can be clearly derived from British and American
internal documents.[3] The well-known U.S. academic Professor Noam
Chomsky at MIT is probably the leading critic of American foreign
policy, and has discussed many of these military operations in detail.
British historian Mark Curtis, former Research Fellow at the Royal
Institute for International Affairs, has similarly documented the
anti-humanitarian nature of British foreign policy, including brutal
Anglo-American military operations in Iran, Kuwait, Egypt, Aden,
Jordan, Chile and Oman, amongst others.[4]
In his study, The Ambiguities of Power, Mark Curtis – who is now with the UK-based charity Action Aid – concludes that:
“Mutual Anglo-American support in ordering the affairs of key nations
and regions, often with violence, to their design has been a consistent
feature of the era that followed the Second World War… Policy in, for
example, Malaya, Kenya, British Guiana and Iran was geared towards
organising Third World economies along guidelines in which British, and
Western, interests would be paramount, and those of the often
malnourished populations would be ignored or further undermined.
Similarly, US interventions overseas - in Vietnam, Nicaragua, the
Dominican Republic, Cuba, Chile, etcetera - were designed to counter
threats to the Western practice of assigning the Third World to mere
client status to Western business interests. British and US forces have
acted as mercenary - and often extremely violent - mobs intended to
restore ‘order’ in their domains and to preserve the existing
privileges of elites within their own societies.”[5]
U.S. foreign policy analyst Edward Herman, Professor Emeritus of
Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, in like manner observes:
“As to the record, the United States has given frequent and
enthusiastic support to the overthrow of democracy in favor of
‘investor friendly’ regimes, including Marcos’s Philippines in 1972,
Pinochet’s Chile in 1973, and that of the Brazilian generals in 1964;
and it has often shifted policy from the support of friendly fascists
like the Somozas in Nicaragua and Ubico in Guatemala to hostility and
active subversion of successor reformist or radical democrats like the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Arevalo and Arbenz in Guatemala.”[6]
This category of profit-orientated policies has been a systematic
feature of international relations since the colonial era of the 1500s
into the 21st century’s age of globalisation.[7] Such policies are thus
an inherent dimension of the centuries old structure of Western
institutions. The internationally acclaimed American political analyst
Michael Parenti[8] provides a particularly acute overview:
“Since World War II, the US government has given more than $200 billion
in military aid to train, equip, and subsidize more than 2.3 million
troops and internal security forces in more than eighty countries, the
purpose being not to defend them from outside invasions but to protect
ruling oligarchs and multinational corporate investors from the dangers
of domestic anti-capitalist insurgency. Among the recipients have been
some of the most notorious military autocracies in history, countries
that have tortured, killed or otherwise maltreated large numbers of
their citizens because of their dissenting political views… US leaders
profess a dedication to democracy. Yet over the past five decades,
democratically elected reformist governments… were overthrown by
pro-capitalist militaries that were funded and aided by the US national
security state.”[9]
But as the former CIA official John Stockwell indicates, many others
include Angola, Guatemala, Brazil, Guyana, Chile, the Congo, Iran,
Vietnam, Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Equador, Uruguay, Laos, Cambodia,
Thailand, Sri Lanka, El Salvador and Korea.[10] As already indicated,
the anti-humanitarian nature of these interventions is well
documented.[11] Majid Tehranian for example, who is Professor of
International Communication at the University of Hawaii and Director of
the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research, points out
that:
“In their scholarship, William Appleton Williams, Noam Chomsky, Richard
Falk, Ramsey Clark, Ali Mazrui, and other critics of US foreign
policies have provided an abundance of evidence to support the charges
on the counter-democratic role of the United States in much of Asia,
Africa, and Latin America.”[12]
Through this programme of Western consolidation, the Western powers
under the lead of the United States have succeeded in
institutionalising their hegemony in the form of a global
politico-economic system, in which they and their multinational
corporations are dominant over largely impoverished, unstable Third
World countries, while being in control of the world’s resources.
Development economist and Director of Research of the California-based
Institute for Economic Democracy (IED), Dr. J. W. Smith, has lucidly
explained the essence of this rarely acknowledged global holocaust: “No
society will tolerate it if they knew that they (as a country) were
responsible for violently killing 12 to 15 million people since WW II
and causing the death of hundreds of millions more as their economies
were destroyed or those countries were denied the right to restructure
to care for their people…
“Unknown as it is, and recognizing that this has been standard practice
throughout colonialism, that is the record of the Western imperial
centers of capital from 1945 to 1990... While mouthing peace, freedom,
justice, rights, and majority rule, all over the world state-sponsored
terrorists were overthrowing democratic governments, installing and
protecting dictators, and preventing peace, freedom, justice, rights,
and majority rule. Twelve to fifteen million mostly innocent people
were slaughtered in that successful 45 year effort to suppress those
breaks for economic freedom which were bursting out all over the world.
“... All [Western] intelligence agencies have been, and are still in,
the business of destabilizing undeveloped countries to maintain their
dependency and the flow of the world’s natural wealth to powerful
nations’ industries at a low price and to provide markets for those
industries at a high price, identical to those raiding parties who
raided the countryside 800 to 1,000 years ago to destroy their capital,
maintain their dependency, and force the countryside to sell their raw
material to, and purchase the manufactured products from, the city. The
defeated/impoverished former colonial world is the countryside for
today’s wealthy imperial centers of capital. The military of today’s
powerful nations are for the same purpose as those Middle Age raiding
parties. Thus, with per capita natural wealth many times that of
Europe, those defeated nations remain impoverished, as that wealth is
continually siphoned to powerful imperial centers of capital.”[13]
This paper contains several case studies of U.S. foreign policy, all of
which clarify that the fundamental values of policy-making do not
concord with humanitarian concerns, but on the contrary systematically
conflict with such concerns. Although the West has always publicly
affirmed its benevolence, altruism, and passionate concern for human
rights, an impartial analysis of the record reveals that this is
essentially a dubious public front behind which other appropriate
policies can be more vigorously pursued. While professing their
interest in human values, the Western governments instead appear to be
oriented towards subjugating the world for the self-interested benefit
of their own elites, at any human cost. This predictably results in the
oppression, impoverishment and devastation of the lives of non-Western
populations. In simple terms, if the non-Western governments do not
comply with Western orders, they must pay the price in blood. The
United States, in other words, routinely sponsors terrorism to secure
its strategic and economic interests. Such U.S. sponsored acts of
terrorism are so frequent and brutal, that they far outweigh in scale
even such horrifying atrocities as occurred on American soil on 11th
September 2001.
II. Pursuing “Fundamental Values” in Nicaragua
II.I The U.S. in Central America
The US intervention in Nicaragua provides a powerful and fairly recent
historical example of the nature of Western covert operations, in
context with the general tenore of U.S. policy toward Central America.
It therefore serves as a useful case study of the Western powers’
attempts to violently enforce their strategy for dominion. Central
America has been a traditional target for U.S. dominion since 1820,
from which other industrial powers from Europe are unequivocally
excluded.[14] For example, between 1900 and the Second World War, the
U.S. had 5,000 marines in Nicaragua for a total of 28 years, had
invaded the Dominican Republic four times, had occupied Haiti for
twelve years, had deposited troops into Cuba four times, into Panama
six times, into Guatemala once, and into Honduras seven times.[15] In
Guatemala alone, the governments supported by the U.S. had killed about
80,000 people by 1987, according to Amnesty International.[16]
In the ensuing analysis we shall be referring frequently to the
disclosures of former CIA official John Stockwell. Stockwell was the
highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the CIA and go public. He
ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force
commander of the CIA’s secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was
awarded the Medal of Merit before he eventually resigned. As a a former
U.S. Marine Corps major who was then promoted to the CIA’s Chief of
Station and National Security Council coordinator – making him a 13
year CIA veteran - Stockwell is a leading authority on the CIA and the
clandestine workings of U.S. foreign policy, whose revelations must
therefore be taken very seriously indeed. Stockwell confirms that the
millions of dollars invested by the United States in Central America
were, in fact, siphoned to the rich rather than the general population
of the countries involved, and consequently culminated in destabilising
the region to a tremendous degree. For example, the CIA and the United
States recruited, trained and funded the police units that were to
become the death squads in El Salvador - and continued to support them
when that became the case. Under the ‘Alliance for Progress’ in the
early 1960s, the CIA developed the treasury police who, as John
Stockwell relates, used to “haul people out at night... and run trucks
over their heads”, and who “have killed something over 50,000 civilians
in the last 5 years [by 1987]”, as reported by the Catholic Church.
According to testimony before the U.S. Congress leaders of the treasury
police were still on the CIA payroll as late as 1982.[17]
Another example of the results of the United States investment is also
discussed by John Stockwell: the ‘public safety program’ which had
operated throughout Central and Latin America for 26 years. This
consisted of “teaching police units to break up popular subversion by
interrogating people”, including “instruction in torture techniques”.
According to Stockwell, Dan Metrione, “the famous exponent of these
things”, “did 7 years in Brazil and 3 in Uruguay, teaching
interrogation, teaching torture. He was supposed to be the master of
the business, how to apply the right amount of pain, at just the right
times, in order to get the response you want from the individual”.
Stockwell remarks that this operation was so conspicuously brutal, that
Amnesty International complained and published reports. This was
followed by United Nations hearings and eventually - under
international pressure - even a U.S. Congress investigation, to
investigate the inaccurately titled ‘public safety program’.[18]
As for the purpose of such policies, this was summed up in an
inviolable principle indicated by U.S. National Security Adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski: “[W]e have to demonstrate that we are still the
decisive force in determining the political outcomes in Central America
and that we will not permit others to intervene” - even if those
“others” constitute the indigenous population.[19] This is a clear
illustration of the blatantly anti-democratic philosophy of U.S.
foreign policy.
II.II U.S. Support of the Somozan Dictatorship
The principle espoused by Brzezinski reveals the actual pretext for
U.S. policy towards Nicaragua. The conditions under the U.S. client
state under the Somozan dynasty of 1937-47 and then 1950-79 had been
horrendous. The last of the U.S.-backed dictators of the Somozan
dynasty, Anastasia Somoza Debayle, like his forefathers, pursued
policies that perpetuated a huge economic disparity in the country,
such that only a small minority prospered under his reign while the
majority remained in poverty. In 1975, the poorest 20 percent of the
population received 4 percent of the national income while the richest
20 percent received 55 percent.[20] The impoverished masses were
subdued with the aid of the U.S.-funded National Guard. Education,
proper nutrition, sanitation and other basic needs were privileges that
pertained only to the wealthy minority.[21]
The results were therefore devastating for the majority of Nicaraguan
people. Over half the population was illiterate; two thirds of children
under five were malnourished; and nine out of ten rural homes had no
safe drinking water. According to the United Nations, over 60 per cent
of the population lived in critical poverty; two thirds were too poor
to fulfill even their most elementary needs; one third lived in
“extreme poverty”. Meanwhile, large landowners and U.S. agribusiness
interests were enriched thanks to export crops, with the inevitably
devastating implications for the majority of the population; 90 per
cent of agricultural credit and 22 times more arable land than that
used to grow basic food crops to feed the malnourished population, was
taken up by export crops for the already wealthy elite.[22]
Nevertheless, like his predecessors Anastasia Somoza was a U.S. ally
and his regime was one of the highest per capita recipients of U.S. aid
in Latin America, including critical military aid. Historian Walter La
Feber notes that “two months before Somoza fled” in July 1979, “the
United States supported his request for a $66 million loan from the
IMF”. It was not long after this that the U.S.“declared [that] the
Guard [i.e. Somoza’s troops] had to be kept to ‘preserve order’”, even
while “at that moment Somoza’s troops were dive-bombing slums,
murdering unarmed people in the streets, and looting the cities,
...killing thousands of women and children.”[23] Some 40,000 civilians
were slaughtered by Somoza’s National Guard before his regime collapsed
despite U.S. efforts to keep him in power.[24]
II.III The Sandinista’s Revolution
The Sandinista Front toppled Somoza’s illegitimate government in the
revolution of 1979. Four years after the collapse of his U.S.-supported
regime in this popular movement, whose aim was primarily to implement a
programme of socio-economic development accruing to the population, a
1983 report of the World Council of Churches recognised the new hope
presented to the Nicaraguan people by the Sandinistan government:
“What we see is a government faced with tremendous problems, some
seemingly insuperable, bent on a great experiment which, though
precarious and incomplete at many points, provides hope to the poor
sectors of society, improves the conditions of education, literacy and
health, and for the first time offers the Nicaraguan people a modicum
of justice for all rather than a society offering exclusively to the
wealthy... and the powerful.”[25]
The Sandinstan government, in other words, whose members had toppled
the U.S.-backed Somozan regime, from its inception attempted to
democratically address the grievances of the population. Oxfam reported
in its aptly titled 1985 report, The threat of a good example?:
“The cornerstone of the new development strategy, spelled out by the
Sandinista Front some years before taking power, was to give priority
to meeting the basic needs of the poor majority. This was to be
achieved by involving people in implementing change at a local level,
through their neighbourhood groups, peasant associations and other
organisations; at a central level, representatives of these
organisations were to cooperate closely with the government ministries.”
The conclusion of the report was that “in Oxfam’s experience of working
in seventy-six developing countries, Nicaragua was to prove exceptional
in the strength of that government commitment”.[26] Genevieve Howe who
co-organised the Women’s Observer Mission to the Elections in Nicaragua
in 1996 similarly details the social gains under the popular government:
“The Nicaraguan revolution had accomplished small miracles for the mass
of poor citizens oppressed by 45 years of the Somoza family
dictatorship. Literacy had increased from 25 percent to 80 percent.
Free education and health care had become state priorities. Land reform
had benefited thousands in the cities and countryside. Countless
projects had been completed with the help of international donations,
including construction of schools, hospitals, and clinics,
establishment of drinking water supplies and waste water disposal,
agricultural irrigation, and environmental protection.”[27]
The U.S. response to the 1979 revolution, when the country’s health and
education budget rose rapidly, when an effective land reform was
instituted, when the infant mortality rate had dropped dramatically, is
revealing. Rather than praising the new government’s unprecedented
successes and popular legitimacy, the country which calls itself the
leader of democratic civilization had in fact discovered a new enemy.
The U.S. accordingly adopted a brutal programme of terror designed to
subvert the new government and re-install a Somoza-style regime.
II.IV The Context of U.S. Intervention in Nicaragua
The state of Nicaragua’s neighbours – e.g. Guatemala, El Salvador,
Honduras - during the ensuing U.S. attempt to subvert the Nicaraguan
government, clearly demonstrates the lack of humanitarian concern
behind U.S. policy. Both the Guatemalan and El Salvadorian regimes were
military dictatorships responsible for the sheer institutionalisation
of state terror, installed and propped up by the United States. Tens of
thousands of civilians were regularly slaughtered by government death
squads trained and armed by the CIA. The vast majority of the
populations were impoverished. U.S. academic Joachim Maitre of Boston
University observes that the America had “installed democracies of the
style of Hitler Germany” in both El Salvador and Guatemala.[28] Paul
Ekins, a Research Fellow at the Department of Economics, Birkbeck
College (University of London) aptly observes that “the absolutely
justified U.S. condemnation of Soviet human rights abuses domestically
and abroad came across to the international community as little more
than ideological point-scoring, because the U.S. was simultaneously
backing some of the most bloody regimes in Latin America, including
Guatemala and El Salvador” throughout the 1980s.[29] Indeed, the
liberal press in the U.S. awarded “Reagan & Co. good marks” for the
policy, urging that further military aid be sent to “Latin-style
facists… regardless of how many are murdered”, because “there are
higher American priorities than Salvadoran human rights”.[30]
Nicaragua thus stood far above its neighbours in terms of its human
rights record, its democracy, and its successful focus on egalitarian
socio-economic reforms. Indeed, this appears to be the fundamental
reason why the Nicaraguan government had to be targeted by the U.S. for
subversion: It was not subservient to the requirements of United States
investors, but was orientated toward the mobilisation of domestic
resources for the benefit of the indigenous population. In contrast,
U.S.-backed Guatemala and El Salvador, whose governments were “of the
style of Hitler Germany”, were entirely open to the requirements of
U.S. corporations; this is why the indigenous populations were so
impoverished - resources were largely monopolised by North American
investors.[31]
Indeed, to fully understand what exactly was implied by the United
States’ installation and support of Latin American dictatorships, one
may undertake at least a cursory inspection of some independent reports
on these regimes. The following was noted, for instance, by the Council
on Hemispheric Affairs:
“More people have died in El Salvador during the past year, largely as
the result of government-condoned right-wing ‘death squad’ killings,
than in all other nations of Latin America combined... The death
toll... reached almost 10,000, with the vast majority of the victims
falling prey to right-wing terrorism sanctioned by key government
officials... [T]hese countless killings have gone unpunished and even
uninvestigated as the government’s own military and police forces are
almost always involved in them”.[32]
As a result approximately 35,000 refugees, mostly women and children,
had been living on the Honduran border in conditions of poverty,
starvation and disease, as reported by the UN High Commissioner for
Refugees. These people were attempting to escape the regular raids of
the Salvadorian army and the government’s paramilitaries, ORDEN. The
latter would cross the border to attack the refugee camps, which had
formed out of the population attempting to escape domestic
state-terror.[33]
After visiting these border regions in January 1981 on a fact-finding
mission, a U.S. congressional delegation submitted a report to
Congress. The report provided extensive documentation of the
U.S.-backed Salvadorian army’s systematic atrocities against its
civilian population, noting that the refugees “describe what appears to
be a systematic campaign conducted by the security forces of El
Salvador to deny any rural base for guerrilla operations in the north…
“By terrorizing and depopulating villages in the region they have
sought to isolate the guerrillas and create problems of logistics and
food supply... The Salvadorean method of ‘drying up the ocean’
involves, according to those who have fled from its violence, a
combination of murder, torture, rape, the burning of crops in order to
create starvation conditions, and a program of general terrorism and
harassment.”[34]
In the introduction to his collection of papers, Towards a New Cold
War, U.S. academic Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor of Linguistics and
Philosophy at MIT comments extensively on the congressional report:
“The report then presents some sample interviews in which refugees
describe the bombing and burning of villages by the army, mass murder
of fleeing civilians, shooting of defenseless peasants from
helicopters, and extraordinary brutality (e.g.: mutilation;
decapitation; ‘children around the age of 8 being raped, and then they
would take their bayonets and make mincemeat of them’; ‘the army would
cut people up and put soap and coffee in their stomachs as a mocking.
They would slit the stomach of a pregnant woman and take the child out,
as if they were taking eggs out of an iguana. That is what I saw’).
With regard to the guerrillas, refugees report: ‘We don’t complain
about them at all,’ ‘they haven’t done any of those kind of things,’
‘it’s the military that is doing this. Only the military. The popular
organization isn’t doing any of this.’ As for the military: ‘They were
killing everybody. They were looking for people to kill - that’s what
they were doing.’... The report concludes that the security
forces of El Salvador, ‘operating independent of responsible civilian
control... are conducting a systematic campaign of terrorism against
segments of their own population.’ In fact, the government is
effectively under right-wing military control, the reformist officers
having been driven out of the junta.”[35]
Unfortunately, the government was also in receipt of a U.S. “program of
support for repression and massacre in El Salvador”, which included
“domestic programs of militarization and alms for the wealthy.”[36]
The New York Times has further recorded the aftermath of the U.S.
operation, noting that “Because the United States armed and financed
the army whose brutality sent them into exile, few Salvadoreans were
able to obtain the refugee status granted to Cubans, Vietnamese,
Kuwaitis, and other nationalities at various times.” The conflict
“lasted from 1979 until 1992”, during which “more than 70,000 people
were killed in El Salvador, most of them by the American-backed army
and the death squads it in turn supported”, thus forcing “many people
here to flee to the United States” where they have often been denied
asylum.[37]
The U.S.-backed junta in Guatemala faired similarly. According to the
National Council of the Jesuit Order in Guatemala, “it is only
necessary to open one’s eyes to realize that here we are ruled by a
system of anti-Christian power which destroys life and persecutes those
who fight for life... This anguishing situation is being maintained
with a repression among the most severe in Guatemala’s recent history.
A regime of unjust force is trying to prevent the working people from
reclaiming their just rights.” The Council reported over three thousand
killings in the first ten months of 1979 alone, by government-backed
death squads acting “with total impunity. It is axiomatic that in
Guatemala there are no political prisoners, only the dead and
disappeared.”[38] Right-wing death squads backed by the U.S.-installed
government were killing tens of thousands with impunity. Amnesty
International (AI) reported that the systematic massacre of the
population, as well as the “tortures and murders”, “are part of a
deliberate and long-standing program of the Guatemalan Government” and
that the “selection of targets for detention and murder, and the
deployment of official forces for extra-legal operations can be
pin-pointed to secret offices in an annex of Guatemala’s National
Palace, under the direct control of the President of the Republic”.
Subsequent AI reports detail the increase of violence since 1980.[39]
As this continued Guatemala’s grim socio-economic conditions degraded
to appalling levels. British journalist Anthony Wild reported that:
“Migrant labour is at the core of Guatemala’s economic system. Four
million rural poor, most of them Indians descended from Maya, scratch a
bare existence from growing maize on plots that are shrinking by
inheritance with each generation; with no jobs in their home villages,
an estimated 1.5 million workers migrate for up to three months of the
year, often taking wives and children with them... The appalling living
and working conditions in which [the haciendas] keep them are the
foundation on which the fabulous fortunes of Guatemala’s elite are
built.”[40]
The government in Guatemala responsible for this state of affairs had
been violently established by America with British support by
overthrowing the reformist Arbenz government in 1954. The operation
occurred under the false pretext of saving the Guatemalan people from
Soviet/Communist aggression.[41] Once the Arbenz administration was
removed, the new U.S. installed regime continued to receive U.S.
support and investment. Contrary to the prevailing myth that in
toppling Arbenz the United States was fighting against an illegitimate
Communist dictatorship, the real reason for the intervention was that
Arbenz’s policies were based on agrarian reform, designed therefore to
redistribute hundreds of thousands of acres to previously landless
Guatemalan peasants. This led to conflict between the interests of U.S.
corporate investors and the Guatemalan people. The United Fruit Company
was the largest landowner, concentrating on the production of bananas
for export to the detriment of the production staple foods for the
consequently malnourished population. Arbenz’s policies echoed the
programme of the Arevalo government before him, a programme that a 1949
CIA assessment referred to as “distinctly unfriendly to U.S. business
interests”; the U.S. State Department similarly recognised that such
policies constituted a threat to Guatemala as “a place for capital
investment”.[42]
Other internal documents disclose U.S. intentions with clarity. In
1952, for instance, U.S. intelligence noted the rise of “militant
advocacy of social reforms and nationalistic policies identified with
the Guatemalan revolution of 1944”, which resulted in 10 years of
democracy before the U.S. intervened to secure its own interests in the
region. “The radical and nationalistic policies” pursued by the
democratic government included “the persecution of foreign economic
interests, especially the United Fruit Company”, and had won “the
support or acquiescence of almost all Guatemalans.” The government had
generated “mass support for the present regime”, proceeding “to
mobilize the hitherto politically inert peasantry” via agrarian reform
and labour organization, undermining the hegemony of large foreign
landowners. “Guatemalan official propaganda, with its emphasis on
conflict between democracy and dictatorship and between national
independence and ‘economic imperialism’, is a disturbing factor in the
Caribbean area”, the U.S. concluded.[43]
In other documents, the U.S. admitted that the democratic revolution of
1944 had contributed to “a strong national movement to free Guatemala
from the military dictatorship, social backwardness, and ‘economic
colonialism’, which had been the pattern of the past”. The “social and
economic programs of the elected government met the aspirations” of the
impoverished, and “inspired the loyalty and conformed to the
self-interest of most political conscious Guatemalans.” Hence, “neither
the landholders nor the [United] Fruit Company can expect any sympathy
in Guatemalan public opinion.”[44] Furthermore, the government’s
“agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social
program of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle
against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong
appeal to the populations of Central American neighbours where similar
conditions prevail.”[45] As far as America was concerned, then,
democracy and social justice were the principal problems. These dire
threats to U.S. hegemony in the region had to be violently eliminated.
Referring to the decades of bloodshed consequently imposed by
U.S.-sponsored terrorists on the Guatemalan population, the chair of
the UN Historical Clarification Commission, Law Professor Christian
Tomuschat, stressed when presenting the UN report on the crisis that
the U.S. government and private companies “exercised pressure to
maintain the country’s archaic and unjust socioeconomic structure.”[46]
This hegemonic imperative was consistently carried out throughout the
region, for example, in Cuba, which was once again targeted for the
familiar reasons. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, writing “as one
involved in the Kennedy administration’s Cuban policy”, reported to
President Kennedy on the conclusions of a 1961 Latin American Mission.
He characterised Cuba’s threat to the United States as “the spread of
the Castro idea of taking matters into one’s own hands” – a serious
problem due to the fact that “the distribution of land and other forms
of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes” throughout
Latin America, a situation favourable to U.S. interests. He highlighted
the fundamental threat of the fact that “the poor and under-privileged,
stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding
opportunities for a decent living.” As for the linkage with the threat
of international Communism emanating from the Soviet Union, Schlesinger
revealed that “Meanwhile, the Soviet Union hovers in the wings,
flourishing large development loans and presenting itself as the model
for achieving modernization in a single generation.”[47]
Nicaragua in the 1980s can therefore be seen to have stood out in only
two fundamental ways from its neighbours such as El Salvador and
Guatemala. Firstly, the Sandinistan government did not slaughter its
population. Secondly, the Sandinistan government had successfully
generated serious efforts to mobilise resources for radical social
reform in the interests of the general population, particularly the
poor. In contrast, tpproximately half the populations of the
U.S.-backed regimes of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador were
impoverished, if not starving to death. In particular, the U.S. client
regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala regularly massacred their own
populations, slaughtering over 100,000 civilians during the 1980s and
into the beginning of 1990s. Yet the U.S. continued to sponsor such
terrorism, propping up the dictatorships responsible for such violence
while actively helping them carry it out, choosing only to militarily
subvert the vastly more democratic and egalitarian Nicaraguan
government of the Sandinistas.
The judicial wing of the United Nations, the International Court of
Justice (or World Court) prohibited the American military operation to
topple the Sandinistan administration in 1986, calling on the United
States to pay substantial reparations. Condemning the “unlawful use of
force” against Nicaragua, the Court further ruled that aid to the
forces attacking Nicaragua was not humanitarian, but military. The U.S.
reacted by dismissing the ruling and escalating the violence. A UN
Security Council resolution that subsequently called on all states to
observe international law was vetoed by the U.S. The U.S. went on to
vote against similar UN General Assembly resolutions in virtual
isolation. U.S. Secretary of State of the time, George Shultz, scoffed
at those who called for “utopian, legalistic means like outside
mediation, the United Nations, and the World Court, while ignoring the
power element of the equation.”[48] His view was echoed by Abraham
Sofaer, the U.S. Department of State legal adviser, who declared that
the majority cannot “be counted on the share our view”, because the
“majority often opposes the United States on important international
questions.” We must “reserve to ourselves the power to determine” which
international questions fall “within the domestic jurisdiction of the
United States, as determined by the United States.”[49]
From all this the following correlation can thus be clearly discerned:
The U.S. is willing to support dictatorship, state terror and mass
impoverishment when these are conducive to opportunities for investment
and access to regional raw materials. However, the absence of
dictatorship, terror, and so on generally also involves the appearance
of independent development and egalitarian socio-economic growth. As
was clarified by Head of U.S. Policy Planning Staff George Kennan in
1948, independence has to be eliminated to permit unimpeded access to
regional resources, and to ensure that the overall system of order
under U.S. hegemony remains stable. Within this world system, the US
remains unaccountable and free to operate at will outside the framework
of international law.[50]
II.V U.S. Backed Terrorism in Nicaragua
Describing the U.S. military operation to oust the Sandinistas, former
CIA official John Stockwell relates that on 16 November 1981, President
Reagan allocated $19 million to develop an army out of ex-Somoza
national guards - the ‘contras’ - who would serve U.S. ends. These were
the very same “monsters who were doing the torture and terror in
Nicaragua” under the Somozan regime with U.S.-support, “that made the
Nicaraguan people rise up and throw out the dictator, and throw out the
guard” in the 1979 revolution.[51] Stockwell affirms that this is in
accord with traditional policies: When the Western powers do not like a
government, he observes, they input resources into manufacturing the
collapse of the social and economic fabric of the country, as a
technique for putting pressure on the government to conform to Western
requirements. Otherwise, the West ensures that the government collapses
altogether via the engineering of a coup d’etat, so that more
appropriate ‘friendly hands’ may retrieve power. It is important to
note, therefore, that the contra force of Somoza’s ex-national
guardsmen was created entirely under U.S. tutelage and funding. Prior
to the U.S. allocation of money, training, arms, leadership, and
supplies, it did not exist - it therefore had no connection to the
wishes of the Nicaraguan people.[52]
In May 1988, a Defense Department official explained America’s basic
objective in creating the contras: “Those 2,000 hard-core guys
[maintained by the US within Nicaragua] could keep some pressure on the
Nicaraguan government, force them to use their economic resources for
the military, and prevent them from solving their economic problems”.
Ex-CIA analyst David MacMichael similarly testified to the World Court
that the U.S. was using the contras to “provoke cross-border attacks by
Nicaraguan forces and thus serve to demonstrate Nicaragua’s aggressive
nature”, as well as to pressurise the popular government to “clamp down
on civil liberties within Nicaragua itself, arresting its opposition,
demonstrating its allegedly inherent totalitarian nature, and thus
increase domestic dissent within the country.”[53]
As for the implications of such policies for the non-Western victim, Stockwell elaborates:
“What we’re talking about is going in and deliberately creating
conditions where the farmer can’t get his produce to market, where
children can’t go to school, where women are terrified inside their
homes as well as outside their homes, where government administration
and programs grind to a complete halt, where the hospitals are treating
wounded people instead of sick people, where international capital is
scared away and the country goes bankrupt. If you ask the State
Department today what is their official explanation of the purpose of
the contras, they say it’s to attack economic targets, meaning, break
up the economy of the country. Of course, they’re attacking a lot
more”.
The U.S. thus utilised its proxy army to engage in a programme of
“killing, and killing, and terrorizing people”, the aim being to
reinforce US hegemony. Under US direction, the contras systematically
blew up “graineries, sawmills, bridges, government offices, schools,
health centers. They ambush trucks so the produce can’t get to market.
They raid farms and villages. The farmer has to carry a gun while he
tries to plough, if he can plough at all.”[54]
The former CIA official adds that the contras also systematically
assassinated religious workers, teachers, health workers, elected
officials and government administrators. He also provides graphic
examples of such U.S. sponsored acts of terrorism:
“They go into villages, they haul out families. With the children
forced to watch they castrate the father, they peel the skin off his
face, they put a grenade in his mouth and pull the pin. With the
children forced to watch they gang rape the mother, and slash her
breasts off. And sometimes for variety, they make the parents watch
while they do these things to the children... This is nobody’s
propaganda. There have been over 100,000 American witnesses for peace
who have gone down there and they have filmed and photographed and
witnessed these atrocities immediately after they’ve happened, and
documented 13,000 people killed this way, mostly women and children.
These are the activities done by these contras. The contras are the
people President Reagan calls ‘freedom fighters’. He says they’re the
moral equivalent of our founding fathers. And the whole world gasps at
this confession of his family traditions.”[55]
The U.S. also employed propaganda techniques to discredit the
Sandinistan government. President Jimmy Carter authorised the CIA to
launch a powerful propaganda campaign to defame Nicaragua’s leaders -
the image to be generated was one of totalitarian Marxism. This
involved not only attacking them in the press, but also funding a
newspaper within Nicaragua itself - La Prensa - which went on to play
its crucial role as a U.S. propaganda arm.[56] In pursuing this
campaign, the U.S. also accused the Nicaraguan government of “building
a war machine that threatened the stability of the whole of Central
America.” The facts were actually quite the contrary. Stockwell points
out that “US Navy ships were supervising the mining of harbors and US
planes were sent in to bomb the Nicaraguan capital, as well as to fly
over the country, photographing it” for the purpose of “aerial
reconnaissance.” In contrast to the enormity of U.S. firepower,
Nicaragua was devoid of missiles or jets with which to defend its
sovereignty. The U.S. nevertheless put forth the basically ridiculous
charge that the force which was eventually built up by Nicaragua was
aggressive in intent, threatening the stability of the entirety of
Central America. Yet as Stockwell points out, prior to the
anti-Sandinistan U.S. operation this military force did not exist in
Nicaragua - it was only established as a direct response to U.S.
intervention, to defend itself from the combination of U.S. bombing and
the mass atrocities perpetrated by U.S.-backed contras. To buttress its
propaganda, the U.S. also declared that arms were flowing from
Nicaragua to El Salvador. But as Stockwell stresses, in five years of
this alleged activity there was simply no evidence of any arms flowing
from Nicaragua into El Salvador; hence, no genuine evidence was ever
cited to support America’s assertions.[57]
Nicaragua was thus eventually forced to obtain arms from Russia to
defend itself from the U.S. operation. The U.S. was consequently
empowered to contend that its justification for attacking Nicaragua was
the Soviet Union’s investment of $500 million in arms to convert
Nicaragua into its client state - “the Soviet bastion in this
hemisphere”. Russia was, however, only invited into Nicaragua, once
again, in response to the U.S. attack against the country. For example,
Newsweek reported in September 1981 that neither the White House nor
the CIA even pretended that the contras had a genuine chance of
winning. Newsweek therefore concluded that the purpose of the U.S.
creation of the contras was as follows: By attacking the country with
this proxy force, one will eventually force the Sandinistas into a more
radical position. One can then cite this more radical position as
justification to attack them on a much larger scale, ignoring the
factors of US aggression that forced them to adopt this position.
Nicaragua was, in other words, compelled as a matter of sheer
self-defence to acquire Soviet military aid in order to protect itself
from U.S. aggression. Once this aid was acquired, the U.S. was in a
convenient position to highlight the fact and misconstrue its
implications. In Stockwell’s words: “They’ve had to get Soviet aid to
defend themselves from the attack from the world’s richest country, and
now we can stand up to the American people and say, ‘See? they have all
the Soviet aid’.”[58] In this way, the U.S. attempted to justify its
intervention by claiming that Nicaragua was the Soviet Union’s foothold
into America - a notion which was contrary to fact. Foreign policy
critic Noam Chomsky comments:
“The people who are committed to these dangerous heresies, such as
using their resources for their own purposes or believing that the
government is committed to the welfare of its own people, may not be
Soviet clients to begin with and, in fact, quite regularly are not. In
Latin America they are often members, to begin with, of Bible study
groups that become self-help groups, of church organizations, and so on
and so forth. But by the time we [via American/Western aggression] get
through with them, they will be Soviet clients. The reason they will be
Soviet clients by the time we get through with them is that they will
have nowhere else to turn for any minimal form of protection against
the terror and the violence that we regularly unleash against them if
they undertake programs of the kind described.”[59]
Another crucial aspect of the U.S. propaganda campaign was the
discrediting of the 1984 elections that had brought the Sandinistas to
power. Stockwell notes: “International observer teams said these were
the fairest elections they have witnessed in Central America in many
years.”[60] Contrary to yet further U.S. deception, the Sandinistas won
a much higher percentage of the vote in their elections than even
President Reagan.[61] The U.S., however, continued to insist that
Nicaragua under the Sandinistas was a totalitarian state. According to
the U.S. the elections held in El Salvador were an ideal model of
democracy to be emulated elsewhere in the world - perhaps highlighting
the kind of a world genuinely envisaged by this superpower. The
horrifying reality of the situation in U.S.-backed El Salvador, as well
as other regional countries, has already been indicated. In terms of
supporting democracy in El Salvador, Stockwell reports that the CIA had
invested $2.2 million there to ensure that the U.S. choice of
candidates - the dictator Duarte - would win power.[62] As noted above,
even Joachim Maitre, a leading academic supporter of U.S. policies
towards Central America, admits that the ‘democracies’ installed and
supported by the US in the region were “of the style of Hitler
Germany”.[63]
The next elections in Nicaragua occurred in 1990. Conventional wisdom
has it that the Sandinistas only agreed to free and fair 1990 elections
under pressure from the U.S.-backed contras. The facts, as illustrated
above, are entirely different. A Boston Globe Editorial reported that
Washington was sending “an implicit message... to the Nicaraguan
people: If you want a secure peace, vote for the opposition.” In other
words, if you wish to stop being slaughtered by the thousand, raped,
mutilated, and economically strangulated, “vote for the [U.S.-backed]
opposition” (the UNO).[64] Thus, a Canadian observer mission sponsored
by unions, development agencies, human rights organisations and
academic groups, concluded after a four-week enquiry into election
preparations that the U.S. “is doing everything it can to disrupt the
elections set for next year... American intervention is the main
obstacle to the attainment of free and fair elections in Nicaragua”. As
for the contras who constituted the key components of the American
intervention, they were attempting to sabotage elections by “waging a
campaign of intimidation with the clear message, ‘if you support the
[Sandinista government] we will be back to kill you’.”[65]
The U.S.-backed opposition therefore won the elections. This victory
clearly constituted nothing other than the triumph of terror over the
wishes of the people. The independent Central America Report, while
noting that Nicaragua alone lived up to the August 1987 Central
American Accords (unlike the U.S. and its contra-puppets), reported:
“Most analysts agree that the UNO victory marks the consummation of the
U.S. government’s military, economic and political efforts to overthrow
the Sandinistas.” “U.S. President George Bush emerged as a clear victor
in the Nicaraguan elections. The decade-long Reagan/Bush war against
Nicaragua employed a myriad of methods - both covert and overt - aimed
at overthrowing the Sandinistas. Bush’s continuation of the two-pronged
Reagan policy of economic strangulation and military aggression finally
reaped tangible results.” The report added:
“While many observers today are remarking that never before has a
leftist revolutionary regime handed over power in elections, the
opposite is also true. Never has a popular leftist government in Latin
America been allowed to undertake its reforms without being cut short
by a coup, an invasion or an assassination.”[66]
II.VI Post-Terror Conditions of Nicaragua
Now that the West’s “invisible government” of the World Bank and
IMF[67] tightly control Nicaragua’s government policies through
restrictions tied to loans, Nicaragua has once more plunged into
deepening poverty. According to the video Deadly Embrace produced by
Compas de La Primavera for the Nicaragua Network Education Fund,
structural adjustment under IMF demands operates “not part as an
economic recovery programme but [is] meant only to create a cheap
labour force, cheap raw materials and a Nicaraguan market for
transnational corporations.”[68] While U.S. and Western corporations
have thus been able to profit enormously from their plundering of
Nicaragua’s resources, the majority of the country’s population have
sunk inextricably deeper and deeper into a cycle of impoverishment and
social chaos. Nicaragua was ranked 85th on the UN’s human development
index in 1991 - a measure that incorporates life expectancy, average
education level, and average per capita income - plummeting to 117th by
1995. By 1997, 80 per cent of the population were living in poverty,
half of those in abject poverty.[69] Genevieve Howe further reports:
“Armed groups continue to harass people in rural areas, usually in a
sort of highway bandit approach to survival, but also with periodic
political assassinations. Innocent civilians continue to be attacked
and/or robbed… Excessive levels of unemployment and poverty have
contributed to higher levels of crime in the cities and an alarming
increase in drug use and suicides. National Police statistics reported
6.3 crimes per hour and 2 suicides every 3 days in 1996. The police
reported 33 suicides in the first 48 days of 1997. There were a total
of 206 suicides in 1996, up from 132 in 1995. Most of the victims are
men under the age of 30. Meanwhile, women and children bear the brunt
of structural adjustment policies. Domestic violence and sexual crimes
against both women and children have also increased markedly.”[70]
This, indeed, is the U.S. “victory” in Nicaragua. John Stockwell has summed up the grim implications aptly:
“We can’t take care of the poor, we can’t take care of the old, but we
can spend millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to destabilize
Nicaragua... Why arms instead of schools? ... [Because they] can make
gigantic profits off the nuclear arms race because of the hysteria, and
the paranoia, and the secrecy. And that’s why they’re committed to
building more and more and more weapons, because they’re committed to
making a profit. And that’s what the propaganda, and that’s what the
hysteria is all about.”[71]
III. A Systematic Policy of Domination
The policy perpetrated in Nicaragua was not unique, but indeed,
undertaken systematically by the United States and other Western powers
throughout the world. Central and Latin America in particular was to be
integrated into U.S. hegemony without exceptions. A brief inspection of
other such instances of this policy provides us with a comprehension of
the degree to which this policy was not accidental, but consistently
oriented toward securing hegemonic dominion over territories for
strategic and economic reasons.
III.I Making Chile Scream
Former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official John Stockwell
has discussed the unpublicised ramifications of CIA intervention in
Chile, in his study The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. in the New
International Security State. “Twice in the 1960s, the CIA spent large
sums of money to influence the outcome of elections in Chile and to
install a president of the United States’ choosing. Eventually it
failed and democracy prevailed in the election of President Salvador
Allende Gossens.”[72] President Allende introduced numerous programmes
of social reform, mobilising domestic resources for the benefit of the
Chilean population at large. One can therefore understand the reasons
behind the subsequent U.S. destabilisation of Allende’s popular,
democratically elected government, considering the egalitarian policies
that this government implemented. Allende’s government pursued a
welfare state model of economic development in accord with its
socialist priorities, therefore falling directly under the intolerable
category of a government that takes responsibility for the welfare of
its own people. Allende’s reforms included improvements in health care,
education, housing facilities and the raising of wages: Thus, resources
would be mobilised for the benefit of the impoverished population.[73]
Furthermore, in accord with these reforms, the new Chilean government
had nationalised U.S. copper companies, resulting in the deduction of
“excess profits” that had been earned in previous years from the
compensation.[74] Aides to Secretary of State Kissinger were therefore
aware that “Allende was a living example of democratic social reform in
Latin America”. Kissinger himself noted in this light that the
“contagious example” of Chile would “infect” Latin America, as well as
southern Europe - unless something was done to eradicate it.[75]
Traditional Western goals therefore led the CIA - under the direction
of President Nixon - to organise “the famous Track I and Track II
destabilization of Chile in order to oust Allende.” Stockwell relates
that the CIA Deputy Director for Operations at the time, Richard Helms
(who later became CIA Director), lied in his testimony before the
congressional Oversight Committee. He was later indicted for lying to
Congress about the U.S. operation in Chile, though he managed to
“plea-bargain a suspended sentence and a fine, which the association of
CIA exes paid for him. Finally, he offered a copy of the notes he had
made in the National Security Council meeting in the White House where
he was ordered to mount the Chilean operation. He had jotted down the
following instructions: ‘Make the Chilean economy scream’.”[76]
The CIA henceforth mounted its highly successful operation to oust the
democratically elected president of Chile. The clandestine
organisation’s task was made easier due to the help of both the U.S.
military - which had infiltrated the Chilean military through the
American-sponsored international military fraternity - and of certain
multinational corporations. The extent of this Western contempt for
Third World democracy was further highlighted by the fact that, as
Stockwell relates:
“At one point prior to the coup, General Rene Schneider, the pro-U.S.
head of the Chilean military, was an obstacle because he was stubbornly
supporting democracy and the constitutional process. So they killed him
too and installed the monster Pinochet in power. About 30,000 people
were killed by Pinochet, whose secret police were so violent that they
even engineered bombings [in Washington DC].”
A remark at the time by then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
when grilled by Congress about the Chilean operation, therefore
clarifies the reality of America’s concerns for the political
participation of the Chilean people in their own affairs: “Yes, the
issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to
decide for themselves.”[77] Evidently, these “issues” spoken of by
Kissinger amount only to the West’s desire to monopolise the wealth and
resources of the world, and are directly opposed to genuine
democratistion.
Hence, the “contagious example” of Allende’s administration in Chile
had to be eliminated to make way for the installment of a more
subservient regime under the reign of Pinochet. It is a fact that even
though Latin America has had a long experience of dictatorship and
military brutality, the violent intensity of the subsequent U.S.-backed
coup and the deliberate use of torture, ‘disappearances’ and murder had
at that time no parallel in the history of the continent. As democracy
was swept away at the hands of America’s puppet-tyrant Pinochet, 11,000
people were killed in the first three months alone, with 2,400
‘disappearing’ in the next three years. Thus, the new Western-backed
Pinochet regime institutionalised what the Catholic Institute of
International Relations (CIIR) describes as a “policy of permanent
terror”.[78] Meanwhile, economic reforms along free market capitalist
guidelines that were open to foreign investment under the instruction
of Western institutions (e.g. the IMF, the World Bank) resulted in the
predictable impoverishment of the Chilean masses, and the further
enrichment of the already wealthy elite.[79] Under Allende’s
government, the majority of the population had maintained a reasonable
standard of living. In contrast, the violent installment of Pinochet
heralded the dismantling of industry, the devaluation of currency and
the impoverishment of the majority. The eventual result was that 40 per
cent of Chileans were so poor, with calorie consumption at such a low
level, that most of them were suffering from hunger and
malnutrition.[80]
The new military dictatorship received $350 million in US bilateral aid
three years after the coup. The U.S. Administration voted for over $400
million in loans to Chile from the World Bank and the Inter-American
Development Bank in 1984,[81] while a little earlier in 1982, the
British Trade Minister had decided that Chile constituted a “moderating
and stabilising force in Latin America”, affirming that Britain was
“interested in deepening and strengthening political relations”.[82]
This was despite the fact that since 1982, the U.S.-backed Chilean
government had implemented numerous techniques of repression to resist
and clamp down upon mounting protests. These techniques included
individual detention, internal exile, mass arrests in poor districts,
murder and torture. The escalating numbers of people who fell under the
devastating impact of such policies constituted a firm base of popular
opposition to the government, clearly manifesting its political
bankruptcy.[83] Coinciding with the business opportunities, Western
elites managed to amass further profits via arms sales to Chile.[84]
Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois, Robert W.
McChesney, reports that: “After fifteen years of often brutal and
savage dictatorship - all in the name of the democratic free market -
formal democracy was restored in 1989 with a constitution that made it
vastly more difficult, if not impossible, for the citizenry to
challenge the business-military domination of Chilean society”
instituted by the West in 1973.[85] Continued Western indifference to
the cause of justice is evident today, in light of Britain’s tremendous
reluctance to convict Pinochet for his massive crimes against humanity,
crimes whose immensity can be gauged from British MP Jeremy Corbyn’s
estimate that Pinochet was responsible for 50,000 civilian deaths in
total since having overthrown the democratically elected Allende
government.[86] The same policy of aversion to justice has been
followed by the United States. Joe Stork, Advocacy Director for the
Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch, comments
that “embarrassment over revelation of U.S. complicity with Pinochet’s
reign of terror is the motivation” for this aversion.[87]
Newly released files declassified by the State Department on 30th June
1999 - making public over 5,000 documents relating to U.S. policy on
Chile in response to the demands of members of Congress and the recent
Spanish prosecutors of Pinochet - provide detailed confirmation of the
anti-humanitarian nature of the intervention. In a special report on
the documents by the American political journal, The Progressive,
investigative journalist Lucy Komisar observes:
“For the Spaniards, the documents provide detailed proof that Pinochet
controlled DINA, the Chilean Directorate of Intelligence, which was
responsible for the most egregious human rights violations in the three
years following the coup. For US citizens, they are a fascinating and
sometimes surreal window onto a US policy fraught with arrogance and,
for the most part, unconcerned about the wholesale human rights abuses
Pinochet was carrying out. His regime detained 40,000 people, tortured
large numbers of them, exiled 9,000, and murdered 4,000. The papers,
redacted and incomplete, cover 1973-1978. They show that Washington had
knowledge of Pinochet’s coup plans, his barbarism upon seizing power,
and the establishment of his international terrorist network. They also
show that the US government, at the highest levels, covered up for
Pinochet, lied to the American public, and did everything in its power
to support the junta. These documents are crucial in setting the
historical record straight.”[88]
Utilising the documents, Komisar elsewhere reports the extent to which
the U.S. went to seal the American-Chilean alliance: “Kissinger tried
to shield the Chilean general from criticism and assure him that his
human rights violations were not a serious problem as far as the U.S.
government was concerned.” One internal State Department memorandum for
example details a meeting between the U.S. Secretary of State and the
Chilean dictator himself on 8 June 1976:
“The memo describes how Secretary of State Kissinger stroked and
bolstered Pinochet, how - with hundreds of political prisoners still
being jailed and tortured - Kissinger told Pinochet that the Ford
Administration would not hold those human rights violations against
him. At a time when Pinochet was the target of international censure
for state-sponsored torture, disappearances, and murders, Kissinger
assured him that he was a victim of communist propaganda and urged him
not to pay too much attention to American critics… Kissinger was dogged
by charges he had promoted the military coup against an elected Allende
government, and he sought to maintain a cool public distance from
Pinochet. But at his confidential meeting, he promised warm support…
Then he made clear that the US government was squarely behind Pinochet.
‘In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you
are trying to do here,’ Kissinger told Pinochet… Kissinger dismissed
American human rights campaigns against Chile’s government as ‘domestic
problems’. And he assured Pinochet that he was against sanctions such
as those proposed by Senator Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts,
which would ban arms sales and transfers to governments that were gross
human rights violators… As if Pinochet could have had any doubt,
Kissinger said, ‘We welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined
government here.’ By overthrowing Allende, you have done a great
service to the West, Kissinger told him.”[89]
It is interventions such as these that the U.S. euphemistically
referred to as self-defence against Communist aggression; in reality,
they evidently consisted of the terrorisation of non-Western
populations for the purpose of subjugating them to Western dominance
and retaining Western control over their resources. To maintain this
terrorisation and subjugation of non-Western populations,
Western-friendly puppet regimes were installed to institutionalise
hegemony. This is what is clearly implied by the following internal
U.S. document:
“It is important to maintain in friendly hands areas which contain or
protect sources of metals, oil and other national resources, which
contain strategic objectives, or areas strategically located, which
contain a substantial industrial potential, which possesses manpower
and organised military forces in important quantities.”[90]
In accord with this scheme, it is often necessary to quell independent
economic growth even in lands which appear relatively insignificant to
Western interests, since if real socio-economic progress can take place
in very poor and resource-empty areas, it will serve as a “contagious
example” which may “infect” other neo-colonised nations to make similar
efforts, given that success is possible even in very bad conditions -
this is the real import of the domino theory. Noam Chomsky has referred
to this actual meaning of the domino theory with irony: “... if a
tiny-nothing country with no natural resources can begin to extricate
itself from the system of misery and oppression that we’ve [the US,
leading the Western nations] helped to impose, then others who have
more resources may be tempted to do likewise.”[91] Therefore, the
solution is to bomb such countries as soon as they begin to embark on a
slightly constructive course of independent development; the U.S.
interventions in Grenada, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, for example,
were all perpetrated in the name of assuring that the “rot does not
spread”,[92] the “rot” being autarkic economic growth. Michael Parenti
has elaborated on this, noting that the motives for intervention are
not necessarily just specific investments in particular resources
within a region, but also include “the overall commitment to
safeguarding the global class system, keeping the world’s land, labor,
natural resources, and markets accessible to transnational investors…
More important than particular holdings is the whole process of
investment and profit. To defend that process [the] state thwarts and
crushes those popular movements that attempt any kind of redistributive
politics, sending a message to them and others that if they try to
better themselves by infringing upon the prerogatives of corporate
capital, they will pay a severe price.”
Citing the example of the U.S. intervention in Grenada, Parenti
observes that this “served notice to all other Caribbean countries that
this was the fate that awaited any nation that sought to get out from
under its client-state status… Today, with its unemployment at new
heights and its poverty at new depths, Grenada is once again firmly
bound to the free market world. Everyone else in the region indeed has
taken note.” For this reason, investments within a particular Third
World country are not necessarily what is at stake. Rather, the
long-range security of the entire system of transnational capitalism
needs to be protected - and this is achieved essentially by punishing
those who attempt to extricate themselves from the world system under
U.S./Western hegemony. “No country that pursues an independent course
of development shall be allowed to prevail as a dangerous example to
other nations.”[93]
III.II Invading Vietnam
All this throws significant light on why the U.S. resolved to invade
Vietnam - yet another classic example of the nature of Western
benevolence, the horrifying implications of which have been dispensed
to the memory hole. The government that the U.S. detested in North
Vietnam was that of the Viet Minh, which was a nationalist-communist
movement headed by Ho Chi Minh. Following the expulsion of imperialist
France by the Viet Minh in 1954, the 1954 Geneva Accords called for
national elections in 1956. These would be held throughout Vietnam with
the ultimate aim of uniting the country. Instead of supporting free
national elections and the unification of the country, the U.S. refused
to sign the Geneva agreement, noting that “if the scheduled national
elections are held in July 1956, and if the Viet Minh does not
prejudice its political prospects, the Viet Minh will almost certainly
win”.[94] After the Geneva Accords, U.S. President Eisenhower admitted
regarding the Vietnamese elections which the US refused to support: “I
have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in
Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as
of the time of the fighting, a possible 80 per cent of the population
would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader”.[95
Thus, the conventional opinion that the Viet Minh was party to a global
Communist conspiracy to violently take over the world is an entirely
ludicrous explanation of the U.S. position, simply because there is no
evidence for this. While aid from the Communist countries, Russia and
China, had certainly been provided to Vietnam, this must be understood
in context with the fact that the history of Vietnam in the twentieth
century is largely one of fighting off hoards of voracious
colonialists. Before 1954, for example, the Vietnamese were attempting
to defend themselves against French colonialists. America was, in fact,
primarily responsible for financing France’s military expenses in its
endeavour to extend French hegemony over Vietnam, as French forces
attempted to annihilate the Viet Minh, resulting in the deaths of up to
one million Indochinese civilians. The U.S. Consul in Vietnam had noted
with admiration of this colonial genocide that the Vietnamese “have,
under the French ‘colonialist’ regime of the past 60 years, witnessed
the creation of a most efficient machine of exploitation and
self-interest, centering in the Bank of Indochina and the fabulous
import-export firms, but also extending throughout all grades and ranks
of French commerce and officialdom”.[96] Indeed, the U.S Secretary of
State was happy to acknowledge in 1947 that “we have fully recognized
France’s sovereign position in that area and we do not wish it to
appear that we are in any way endeavouring [to] undermine that
position”.[97]
The first arms supplies to the independence movement in Vietnam arrived
from China in 1950. This was only four years after France had embarked
upon its colonial bombardment of Vietnam; it is therefore highly
inaccurate to interpret this military aid as a step towards a momentous
East-West confrontation of global implication. This exaggeration is
merely a distortion of the fact that the Vietnamese were supplied such
aid to defend themselves against French colonialist hordes backed by
the U.S. The fact remains that the Viet Minh essentially constituted a
nationalist movement led by the popular Vietnamese Communist Party,
which was fighting for the sake of the overall independence of Vietnam;
independence meant freedom from colonial control by both the East and
the West. U.S. academic Harry Piotrowski confirms that the Viet Minh
leader, Ho Chi Minh, “grafted the national liberation movement onto
communism, which gave him a vision of the future, the certainty of an
historic process that promised victory and an organisational
blueprint”. Communist ideology “scarcely played a role in motivating
resistance”, observes Piotrowski of the Viet Minh.[98] Similarly,
Vietnam War veteran Jeff Drake points out having reviewed Ho Chi Minh’s
history that “for anyone to claim that Ho Chi Minh’s primary interest
was the promotion and spread of communism is to deny his entire life’s
work. It is a lie, pure and simple. And the people at the topmost
echelon of our government who were spreading this lie knew
better.”[99] Indeed, the policy planners were well aware of the
real nature of the Vietnamese independence movement. However, they did
not wish to defend the freedom of the Vietnamese, but wished to ensure
that they remained subjugated under Western neo-colonial domination,
thus also ensuring that Vietnam could not constitute an example of
democratic socialist reform for other nations to follow.[100
Thus, the U.S did not wish the Viet Minh to attain power through free
elections, not due to any global communist conspiracy, but due to the
fact that this essentially nationalist movement threatened to bring
Vietnam - and its resources - free from Western domination, by
mobilising domestic resources for egalitarian gains for the population.
This was reflected in the system established by the Viet Minh in which
land ownership had been expanded for the benefit of the impoverished.
In 1952, the U.S. noted that if Indochina did not succumb to Western
domination, other nations would be inspired to follow this example in
accord with the ‘domino’ theory; hence, “the principle source of
natural rubber and tin and a producer of petroleum and other
strategically important commodities” would be lost in Malaya and
Indonesia. Historian Gabriel Kolko points out that in the 1960s “raw
materials, though less publicly cited than earlier, were still
prominent in the decision makers’ vision. This included the
preservation of existing markets” in which plundering of other people’s
resources was the traditional policy. The U.S. therefore did not want
“the rot” of independent economic growth “to spread” elsewhere,[101]
since it would hinder U.S. domination over the world’s resources.
Hence, “the rot” in Vietnam had to be bombed into oblivion.
The U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam, which was later replaced since
it had not been following orders, was further boosted by the U.S.
before the latter directly invaded the region, on the alleged pretext
of ‘defending’ South Vietnam against the attack of North Vietnam. Ngo
Dinh Diem’s U.S.-friendly regime of the south, in contrast to that of
Ho Chi Minh’s in the north, was an unpopular police state in which the
masses were impoverished and regularly slaughtered by government
forces, who were armed and trained by the U.S. In 1958, for instance,
the regime had held at least 40,000 political prisoners, and had
managed to kill 12,000 people.[102] In fact, U.S. regimes in Vietnam
had nothing to do with the interests of the population, and only
existed due to U.S. aid, lacking indigenous support. Hence, Kolko
comments that “the process of conflict” in Vietnam “after 1954 was
essentially a struggle between a radical Vietnamese patriotism,
embodied in the Communist Party, and the United States and its wholly
dependent local allies”.[103]
Former CIA official Ralph McGhee, who worked with the agency for 25
years, admits that the U.S.-backed Diem’s “minions killed, tortured and
imprisoned tens of thousands who resisted his unfair rule.”[104] In
January 1965, orders were issued to U.S. special forces in South
Vietnam “to conduct operations to dislodge VC-controlled officials, to
include assassination” and to employ “pacification” techniques, such as
“ambushing, raiding, sabotaging, and committing acts of terrorism
against known VC personnel.”[105] A 1965 internal memorandum by field
operation coordinator of the U.S. Operations Mission, John Paul Vann,
similarly reveals that the U.S. wished to utilise “effective political
indoctrination” against the “unsophisticated, relatively illiterate
rural population” in South Vietnam, under a U.S.-instituted “autocratic
government”, headed by Diem at the time, which would be “orientated
toward the exploitation of the rural and lower class urban population”,
to the benefit of U.S. investors, who could then be free to plunder
domestic resources.[106] McGhee observes that: “It was this vicious
repression that eventually forced the North Vietnamese to join with
their compatriots in the South to fight against Diem and his US
backers.”[107]
The U.S., of course, could not tolerate any threat to its hegemony in
the form of Ho Chi Minh’s popular policies of egalitarian reform; the
U.S. invaded because such “rot” had to be prevented from spreading. The
result of the U.S. invasion was the complete devastation of Vietnam. In
1962, the U.S. attacked rural South Vietnam, where more than 80 per
cent of the population lived. The virtually defenceless civilian
population was deliberately targeted. This included the employment of
chemical weapons such as napalm and Agent Orange, along with heavy
bombing. In 1964, the U.S. began planning the ground invasion of South
Vietnam. This eventually occurred in 1965, along with the bombing of
North Vietnam and an intensification of the bombing of the south. The
bombing of the south was at triple the level of the more publicised
bombing of the north, not to mention America’s implementation of the
so-called ‘pacification’ policy of rounding up civilians against their
will into concentration camps known as ‘strategic hamlets’, for the
purpose of controlling the population and depriving the liberation
movement of support. Millions of civilians were killed, survivors were
severely traumatised, while the region remains devastated in numerous
ways, all as a result of the US bombardment.
Moreover, much of the devastation continues to this day thanks to US
efforts to ensure that both itself and others do not give aid to the
war-torn Vietnam.[108] Respected Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk
reported on his visit to Vietnam in 1988 that “thousands of Vietnamese
still die from the effects of American chemical warfare”. According to
official estimates, there are about a quarter of a million victims in
South Vietnam, many of whom were children infected with fatal birth
deformities and cancer, witnessed firsthand by Kapeliouk during
“terrifying” sequences at southern hospitals.[109] The Wall Street
Journal similarly reported that as a consequence of the chemical
bombardment of South Vietnam by U.S. forces in an effort to destroy
crops and ground cover, half a million Vietnamese children may have
been born with dioxin-related deformities. Japanese and Vietnamese
scientists have discovered birth defects to be four times as high in
the South than in the North. Aid from Europe and Japan to attempt to
alleviate the disastrous impact of U.S. intervention has been “paid no
heed” by an “emotionally spent” America.[110]
The conventional opinion is that the U.S. lost the Vietnam War. This is
not accurate. As is now clear from previous analyses, U.S. aims in
Vietnam were to devastate the country to such an extent that it could
not follow through with successful policies of independent egalitarian
development, which may have brought Vietnam out of U.S. sphere of
influence and served as an example for other nations to do the same.
Though the U.S. was not able to re-install another repressive
government, its primary aim of preventing the country from implementing
egalitarian policies were fulfilled: The Vietnamese suffered
approximately four million deaths; the standard of living remains
almost the same as it had been in 1950; all egalitarian hopes and
incentives have virtually disappeared. In other words, as far as the
Vietnamese are concerned, the war was pointless. The only result for
Vietnam has been devastation. The U.S. has ensured that Vietnam remains
in a state of underdevelopment by pressuring other countries not to
give aid to the country, as well as by imposing embargoes and
sanctions, despite strenuous objections from allies in Europe and
Japan. India, for example, tried to donate 100 water buffalo to Vietnam
to replace the herds that were wiped out during the war, and which are
so crucial to Vietnamese survival. In opposition to the Indian gesture,
the U.S. threatened to cancel Food for Peace aid, and so India, a
country that is itself highly dependent on foreign aid, withheld its
support. The message to the Third World heralded by the U.S. invasion
of Vietnam is therefore clear. Anyone who attempts to protest against
Western hegemony will be ruthlessly smashed - and they will stay
smashed.[111]
IV. Post-Cold War Imperialism in Colombia
Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the United States has had
a particularly freehand to impose its hegemony as elite interests
require, without obstruction from its former Cold War rival. Yet since
the pretext of international Communism thus no longer constitutes a
viable scapegoat, it has been necessary to construct other alleged
Third World threats that provide the just noted pretext for
strategically motivated military intervention. The case of Colombia
provides a particularly apt example of this.
IV.I Slaughter in the Name of Democracy
Colombia falls into that brand of Third World ‘democracies’ that the
U.S. prides itself in defending, as it had done in Nicaragua, El
Salvador and Guatemala. Indeed, the nature of Colombian ‘democracy’ can
be understood in consideration of its two political parties - Liberals
and Conservatives - who have been responsible for waging violent power
struggles against one another at the expense of the general population
for decades. From 1948-53, 300,000 were left for dead because of one of
the latest of such struggles, and killings have continued up to this
day. The fact is that there is no fundamental ideological difference
between these two parties, who hold the same position on social and
economic issues. As a consequence of this socio-economic consensus, 3
per cent of the population own 70 per cent of the arable land, the
result being that a third of the population control 70 per cent of the
country’s wealth, leaving the rest in a state of hunger and
impoverishment.[112] According to a 1986 report of the National
Administration Bureau of Statistics, 40 per cent of Colombians are
toiling under conditions of “absolute poverty” in which rudimentary
subsistence needs go unmet. Eighteen per cent are unable to fulfil
their basic nutritional requirements and consequently live in “absolute
misery”. Four and a half million children under 14 - equivalent to one
out of every two children - go hungry.[113]
With Colombian ‘democracy’ in such a meaningless state of violently
repressive oligarchy, guerrilla movements that wished to overthrow the
ruling government began forming in the late 1980s in response to
government brutality (the main groups are the FARC and ELN). In 1985,
the government offered amnesty to the guerrillas who would give up
their arms to form a peaceful political party that could compete in
elections. Thus was formed the popular Union Patriotica Party (UP),
offering meaningful alternatives to the Colombian masses whose rights
and needs had been trampled by the Liberals and Conservatives. With the
arrival of elections, the UP proved to be the party favoured by the
Colombian people, as members were elected into the city council, state
assembly, national Congress, and so on. However, the ‘amnesty’ revealed
itself to be an insidious fraud, when almost all the UP’s elected
officials - about 4,000 - including its presidential candidates, were
killed by the Colombian army under the orders of the established
government. Subsequently, the guerrilla movements have returned with
the only method of change they conceive to be viable in light of the
fact that all peaceful political dissent is violently rooted out by the
government - overthrowing the established dictatorial regime by force.
The official political agenda of the major guerrilla movements is to
protect the interests of the Colombian masses by fighting against the
existing oligarchy; they call openly for agrarian reform,
democratisation, and the protection of domestic resources from
foreign/Western multinational corporations. This explains why the U.S.
is so keen to eliminate them.[114]
The context of the tremendous scale of the violence and poverty in
Colombia - continuing into the new millenium - was explained clearly by
the former Colombian Minister of Foreign Affairs Alfred Vasquez
Carrizosa, now President of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human
Rights. He observes that “poverty and insufficient land reform” “have
made Colombia one of the most tragic countries of Latin America”, by
constituting the source of the violence. The land reform legislated for
in 1961 “has practically been a myth” that remains so because wealthy
landowning elites “have had the power to stop it”. Carrizosa dismisses
Colombian ‘democracy’ as a mere “facade” under which lurks “the dual
structure of a prosperous minority and an impoverished excluded
majority, with great differences in wealth, income, and access to
political participation.” The “violence” that has arisen as a
consequence of this institutionalised disparity “has been exacerbated
by external factors” - primarly U.S. support of the regime. This
enthusiastic American support for Colombian state-terror is “a way to
make the military establishment the masters of the game”. U.S. policy
therefore establishes “the right” of Third World elites “to combat the
internal enemy”: “it is 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.”[115]
The results of this are that in total, an estimated more than 40,000
Colombians have been victims of politically motivated killings, the
vast majority being poor peasants. According to Father Giraldo’s
Intercongregational Commission of Peace and Justice, over 67,000
Colombians were killed between 1988 and 1995. More than 3,000 people
have ‘disappeared’. The killers have not been members of the
aforementioned guerrilla movements - this is not surprising, since
these movements originated solely to represent the interests of the
Colombian masses. On the contrary, the perpetrators are the Colombian
military, co-working with paramilitary death squads, all of whom are
murdering and terrorising people on behalf of the Colombian government
with the support of the United States – a policy perpetrated on the
official pretext of the “war on drugs”.[116] More than one million
people have been internally displaced due to the escalating armed
conflict. The victims have primarily been civilians, including
community leaders, trade unionists, political and social activists,
human rights defenders and peasant farmers living in areas whose
control is disputed between armed forces, their paramilitary allies and
guerrilla organisations.[117] Every year, many hundreds of
non-combatant civilians are killed during counterinsurgency operations.
Scores of people, largely poor peasants, ‘disappear’ after having been
detained by the armed and security forces or paramilitary forces, and
torture is widespread.[118]
IV.II Complicity of the U.S.-backed Colombian State
To understand the scale of the violence, we should consider the fact
that in the first eight months of 1998 an estimated 150,000 people were
displaced. Human Rights Watch (HRW) records in its 1998 World Report
that an additional 619 people were killed in the first six months of
the same year. In cases where a perpetrator was suspected, 73 per cent
of these killings were attributed to paramilitaries, 17 per cent to
guerrillas, and 10 per cent to state agents. The Permanent Committee
for the Defence of Human Rights in Colombia reports the total number of
killings in 1998 to have been 3,832.[119] Even the U.S. State
Department has confirmed the general level of violence in 1998,
reporting 2-3,000 killed and 300,000 new refugees, with 80 per cent of
massacres attributed to the Colombian military and its paramilitary
associates.[120]
Moreover, the violence has only systematically escalated. The Colombian
Commission of Jurists reported near the end of 1999 that the rate of
killings had increased by 20 per cent compared to the previous year.
Paramilitary atrocities rose from 46 per cent in 1995 to 80 per cent in
1998 and 99.[121] Human rights activist Daniel Bland, who conducted
research in Colombia for most of the 1990s, observes that from
1997-2000 “more than a million people have been forced from their homes
in the countryside, and between 5,000 and 7,000 unarmed peasants have
been slaughtered by right-wing paramilitaries.”[122] From June to
August 1999 alone, another 200,000 civilians were deported from their
homes according to the estimate of UNICEF and the Colombian Human
Rights Information Bureau.[123]
The testimony of independent observers, including human rights
activists, similarly confirms that the main perpetrator of these
atrocities is the Colombian state army, which has continued to commit
serious violations with little apparent will to investigate or punish
those responsible. In eastern Colombia, for instance, HRW reported that
the army was directly implicated in the killing of civilians and
prisoners taken hors de combat, as well as torture and death threats.
In the rest of the country, where paramilitaries had developed a
pronounced presence over the past decade, the army not only tolerated
their activity, including egregious violations of international
humanitarian law; it provided some paramilitary groups with
intelligence and logistical support to carry out operations, actively
promoting and coordinating joint manoeuvres with them.[124]
As the Bogotá-based office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights noted in its March 1998 report:
“Witnesses frequently state that [massacres] were perpetrated by
members of the armed forces passing themselves off as paramilitaries,
joint actions by members of the armed forces or police and
paramilitaries, or actions by paramilitaries enjoying the complicity,
support or acquiescence of the regular forces.”
The report thus came to the same crucial conclusion as other
independent observers: that there was abundant evidence of continued
joint Colombian military and paramilitary actions that resulted in
human rights violations as well as a disregard for the laws of war by
all parties to the conflict.[125] The Director of the Colombian Office
of the UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson, similarly attributes
responsibility for “the magnitude and complexity of the paramilitary
phenomenon” to the Colombian government.[126]
The paramilitary forces’ close link with the Colombian military is
extensively documented by both Human Rights Watch and the United
Nations in studies released at the beginning of 2000. The UN study
concludes that the military has “undoubtedly enabled the paramilitary
groups to achieve their exterminating objectives,”[127] a picture even
admitted by the U.S. Department of State in its annual report which
states that “security forces actively collaborated with members of the
paramilitary groups”, while “government forces continued to commit
numerous, serious abuses, including extrajudicial killings, at a level
that was roughly similar to that of 1998” – when the State Department’s
annual report estimated that around 80 per cent of atrocities were
attributable to the military co-working with paramilitaries.[128]
Amnesty International similarly reports that the war against drugs is
“a myth”, with Colombian security forces working closely with
paramilitaries, narco-traffickers and landlords to target political
opposition, community leaders, human rights and health workers, union
activists, students, and most of all peasants. Indeed, “almost every
Colombian military unit that Amnesty implicated in murdering civilians
two years ago was doing so with U.S.-supplied weapons”.[129]
IV.III Complicity of the West
HRW reported that according to the Displaced Support Group (Grupo de
Apoyo a Desplazados, GAD) - an alliance of human rights, church, and
humanitarian aid groups - over one million Colombians have been
displaced by violence. By the time of writing this has almost doubled
to two million. The primary cause of forced displacement includes
violations of human rights and the laws of war. HRW points out that
“displacement was also caused by powerful business interests”
originating with the Colombian government and the Western multinational
corporations co-working with the government, “which joined forces with
paramilitaries to force poor farmers from their land, then occupied it
or bought it for paltry sums. Several regions buffeted by massacres,
fighting, targeted killings, and threats produced forced displacement
in 1998”.[130] As Matthew Knoester of the U.S.-based human rights group
Colombia Support Network (CSN) reports:
“Evidence suggests that military aid to Colombia is being used for
purposes other than to fight a ‘war on drugs’. Instead, U.S. dollars
are used to fund counterinsurgency campaigns and a vast land grab by
those who already have large tracks of land. Large landowners hire
paramilitary groups to ‘defend’, and in fact increase their holdings.
The paramilitary groups work hand in glove with the Colombian military.”
This has resulted in the increased suffering of the Colombian people while rich landowners get richer:
“Between 1990 and 1994, Colombians living below the poverty line
increased by one million, to include about half of Colombia's
population of 33 million people. In the countryside, 48% of the land is
owned by rich absentee landowners making up 1.3% of the rural
population while the campesinos, comprising 63% of the rural population
own less than 5% of the land, according to [Father] Giraldo’s Justicia
y Paz magazine.”[131]
Despite the mass atrocities committed jointly by Colombian military and
paramilitary forces, the U.S. has been supplying these forces with
military training and equipment. HRW reports that: “In fiscal year
1998, Colombia was slated to receive at least $119 million in
counternarcotics assistance, including military equipment and
training.” This military aid has accrued to Colombian forces in the
name of ‘counter-narcotics assistance’ (otherwise known as the ‘war on
drugs’), despite the fact that these forces concentrate their training
and equipment not on counter-narcotics operations, but on slaughtering
and displacing civilians in the name of America’s “powerful business
interests”. According to the State Department’s own human rights report
of 1998, “the armed forces” receiving U.S. military equipment and
training “committed numerous, serious human rights abuses”. The report
also noted that: “the Samper administration has not taken action to
curb increased abuses committed by paramilitary groups, verging on a
policy of tacit acquiescence.”[132]
Thus, although the armed security forces receiving military training
and equipment are fundamentally responsible for the massacres and mass
displacements of Colombian civilians, “the Central Intelligence Agency
and U.S. Defense Department continued to work with Colombian security
force units”, such that as HRW states, “according to the Washington
Post” U.S. officers continued to train Colombian units in “shoot and
manoeuvre” techniques - conveniently labeled “counterterrorism” and
“intelligence-gathering”. Such skills, as the U.S. is well aware, are
systematically employed by Colombian units to repress, slaughter and
displace Colombian civilians, as well as to silence legitimise
political opposition to the regime.[133] In a February 2000 report HRW
thus presented once more “detailed, abundant, and compelling evidence
of continuing close ties between the Colombian Army and paramilitary
groups responsible for gross human rights violations… military support
for paramilitary activity remains national in scope and includes areas
where units receiving or scheduled to receive US military aid
operate.”[134]
The results of U.S. aid have therefore continued to be predictably
anti-humanitarian, serving to prop-up an illegitimate regime while
supporting its war against its own people. The Universal Press
Syndicate reports: “In Colombia, the genocide against the poor is
indiscriminate and includes indigenous people, Afro-Colombians,
campesinos and anyone who expresses political dissent” against the
Colombian tyranny so frequently and falsely described as a ‘democracy’
by the US - revealing once again the real American conception of
‘democracy’. “In Colombia, the military and paramilitary troops” being
funded and armed by Uncle Sam, “are primarily responsible for perhaps
85 per cent of the human rights violations.”[135]
Yet again, such lack of significant Western benevolence continues to
illustrate the West’s real objectives and concerns. A report in
London’s respected daily newspaper, The Guardian, summarises the
situation:
“In Colombia, according to US state department estimates, the annual
level of political killing by the government and its paramilitary
associates matches that of Kosovo, and more than a million people have
fled the atrocities. Colombia has been the leading western recipient of
US arms and training as violence has grown through the 90s. That
assistance is now increasing under a ‘drug war’ pretext that is
dismissed by almost all serious observers. Bill Clinton’s
administration has been particularly enthusiastic in its praise of
[Colombia’s] President Gaviria, whose tenure in office was responsible
for appalling levels of violence, according to human rights
organisations.”[136]
Naturally, without the sort of significant public pressure that arose
in regard to countries like East Timor, the U.S. has been quite content
to overtly continue - in fact escalate - its anti-humanitarian
policies. The New York-based International Action Center (IAC), founded
and headed by former U.S. Attorney-General Ramsey Clark, reported in
1999 that “U.S. government intervention in Colombia has grown
tremendously” and that “U.S. military aid has tripled in the last year
alone, to nearly $300 million.” Additionally, “U.S. Special Forces are
[continuing their] training [of] the Colombian army in
counterinsurgency tactics”, the same army whose units, working closely
with its paramilitary subordinates, are responsible for murdering and
displacing civilians. Meanwhile, “Human rights groups have documented
Pentagon and CIA support for the death squads in Colombia.” Gloria La
Riva, award-winning videographer and West Coast Co-ordinator of the
IAC, reports that “the US government and their Colombian proxies have
the blood of tens of thousands of trade unionists, indigenous people
and other progressives on their hands.” Another Co-ordinator of the
IAC, Sara Flounders, has thrown light on such policies, as well as on
the role of the previously mentioned ‘powerful business interests’:
“The U’was [indigenous people of Colombia] have waged a tremendous
legal and political battle against Los Angeles-based Occidental
Petroleum, which has tried to exploit U’wa land. Oil companies in
Colombia often fund private armies to battle against the people’s
movement there - armies which are intimately connected to the
paramilitary death squads and US military funding.”[137]
Such ‘powerful business interests’ originating in the U.S., exist
simply because Colombia has abundant resources, such as oil, coal,
gold, emeralds, platinum and uranium. The country is therefore a
primary target of U.S. hegemony, under the sacred principle of
America’s absolute access to world resources at the expense of the vast
majority of the population of that world. We may take the region
Magdalena Medio as an example of the strategic importance of Colombia.
According to another American human rights organistion, the Colombia
Support Group of Minnesota, “The Magdalena Medio is a strategic zone in
that it is rich in gold, uranium, petroleum, silver, emeralds and
fertile land. Unfortunately, the civilian population in this region is
caught in the middle of a power struggle between paramilitary,
government and guerrilla forces”, perpetuated by the U.S. and
U.S.-based corporations which are supporting the joint operations of
government and paramilitary forces to eliminate people’s movements, and
thereby control and exploit Colombian resources.[138] The U’wa Defense
Working Group - a coalition of U.S.-based human rights and
environmental organisations working with the indigenous U’wa people of
Colombia - reviewing the latest U.S. policies in this regard, reports
the testimony of Carwil James from Project Underground who has been
working in support of the U’wa since 1997: “The truth on the ground in
Colombia is that a U.S.-backed police and military force is using
violent tactics to serve a U.S. company - Occidental Petroleum -
against a peaceful community, all in the name of oil.”[139]
The redundant justification for these policies is the aforementioned
fraudulent ‘war on drugs’. As the independent Colombia Support Network
(CSN) points out, the very U.S.-backed “Colombian military and the
paramilitaries that receive their [American] support are seriously
involved in the drug trade.”[140] The CSN refers to “the continued
providing of military aid by the US government to Colombia, which this
year [1999] ranks third among all military aid recipients of this
country. This aid, supposedly granted to fight the so-called War on
Drugs, is increasingly used to support military and police forces in
Colombia who collaborate with paramilitary leaders, such as Carlos
Castano, who themselves are participants in the drug trade.”[141] Even
the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reports that “all
branches of government” in Colombia are deeply involved in
“drug-related corruption”.[142] Journalist John Donnelly reported in
March 2000 that: “The leader of the paramilitaries [Carlos Castano]
acknowledged last week in a television interview that the drug trade
provided 70 per cent of the group’s funding.” Castano admitted that his
militias are “financed by extortion and income from 30,000 hectares of
coca fields in Norte de Santander.” Notably, “the U.S.-financed attack
stays clear of the areas controlled by paramilitary forces” implicated
in systematic massacres of civilians.[143]
In contrast, in some areas the FARC “are not involved at all” in coca
production, whereas in others “they actively tell the farmers not to
grow” the drug crop.[144] While FARC leaders agree that some of their
funds derive from the taxing of coca production alongside other
businesses, according to Klaus Nyholm who runs the UN Drug Control
Program “the guerrillas are something different from the traffickers”.
FARC fronts are “quite autonomous”.[145] They have, furthermore, called
for “a development plan for the peasants” that would “allow eradication
of coca on the basis of alternative crops.” “That’s all we want”,
stated FARC leader Marulanda.[146] In contrast, the U.S. refused to
attend the Conference of Illicit Drug Crops and Environment on 29-30
June, which was held as part of talks between the FARC-EP and the
Colombian government. “The FARC presented the government with a five
year test plan to stop coca growing completely in one region of
Colombia through government aid that would allow farmers to plant
alternative crops”, reported the IAC. Spokesman for the FARC, Raul
Reyes, had stated: “Money is needed for social investment in order to
begin plans to replace cocca, poppy and marijuana with healthy
products”. But as the IAC observes: “The government rejected the plan
completely. The U.S. refused even to attend the conference.”[147]
The fabricated war on drugs is therefore being utilised as warrant for
the U.S. to increase its military assistance to the current
anti-humanitarian Colombian regime, with the view to aid its violent
eradication of all political dissent - including the guerrilla
movements - which are threatening to remove the government and replace
it with a system representative of the masses and their legitimate
needs. The U.S. wishes to maintain and enforce the hegemony of its
multinational corporations, thereby retaining monopoly over Colombia’s
rich resources; the war on drugs is an adequate pretext by which to
mislead the public and embark on yet another brutal, self-interested
military operation. “It is the same policy”, observes Amnesty
International, “that backed death squads in El Salvador in the
1980s.”[148] Indeed, the real intentions are clear from the fact that
the most effective possible measures to tackle the drug problem are
treatment and prevention, not current U.S. strategies. For example, a
Rand Corporation study sponsored by the U.S. Army and Office of
National Drug Control Policy concluded that funds invested in domestic
drug treatment were 23 times more effective than “source country
control” – the essence of the Colombia Plan – 11 times more effective
than interdiction, and 7 times more effective than law enforcement. Yet
when California Democrat Nancy Pelosi called for an amendment for the
funding of drug demand-reduction services in a U.S. House Committee on
Clinton’s Colombia Plan, her proposal was rejected.[149]
With hegemonic interests high as usual on the agenda, in June 1999 the
U.S. proposed the creation of a multinational force for Latin America
during a meeting of the Organisation of American States (OAS). The
proposal called for a “group of friendly countries” to intervene in
internal conflicts threatening “democracy” in Latin American
countries.[150] The CSN dismissed the U.S. proposal, “which stunned
Latin American nations, [as] an apparent effort to obtain OAS approval
for a US led strike force, similar to that used by NATO in
Kosovo-Yugoslavia, which would intervene in any country with a
‘democratic’ facade whose government is under attack, such as is
currently happening in Colombia.” The U.S. was therefore attempting to
manufacture a legal basis for invading any Latin American country in
the name of protecting its ‘democracy’, just as was done in Guatemala,
El Salvador, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Chile and all the other victims of the
U.S. conception of Third World ‘democracy’. In other words, the U.S.
was hoping for a way to legitimise military interventions in Latin
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