Part 2

Juan Manuel Santos, notorious Defense Minister in the regime of outgoing President Alvaro Uribe and closely identified with high crimes against humanity “won” the recent Presidential elections in Colombia, June 2010. The major electronic and print media CNN, FOX News, Washington Post, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the once liberal Financial Times (FT) hailed Santos election, as a great victory for democracy. According to the FT, “Colombia not Venezuela is (the) best model for Latin America” (FT 6/23/2010 p. 8). Citing Santos “overwhelming” margin – he garnered 69% of the vote, the FT claimed he won a “strong mandate” (FT 6/22/2010). In what has to be one of the most flagrant cover-ups in recent history, the media accounts exclude the most egregious facts about the elections and the profoundly authoritarian policies pursued by Santos over the past decade. The elections: Guns, elites and terror

Elections are a process (not merely an event) in which prior political conditions determine the outcome. During the previous eight years of outgoing President Uribe’s and Defense Minister Santos’ rule, over 2 million, mostly rural poor, were forcibly uprooted and driven from their homes and land and displaced across frontiers into neighboring countries, or to urban slums. The Uribe-Santos regime relied on both the military and the 30,000 member paramilitary deathsquads to kill and terrorize entire population centers, deemed “sympathetic” to the armed insurgency, affecting several million urban and rural poor. Over 20,000 people were killed, many, according to the major Colombian human rights group, falsely labeled “guerrillas”. Santos as Defense Minister was directly implicated by the Courts in what was called “false positives”. The military randomly rounded up scores of poor urban youth, shot them and claimed a resounding victory over the FARC guerrillas.

In fact Santos received 30% of the vote of the electorate, hardly a mandate. If we examine the social-ecological background of the voters, it is clearly a mandate from the elite. The highest levels of abstention were among several distinct groups. Among the shanty towns and rural areas suffering from repression and neglect, abstention rose to over 80%. In contrast, in the middle and upper class sectors of the major cities, over 60% voted for the candidate of the regime. Uribe-Santos tried to explain away the massive abstention by citing the weather (rain) and the World Cup soccer matches .However the low turnout took place throughout the country, in dry and inclement weather. And the games did not occupy the entire day of voting. The mass media systematically ignored the horrendous crimes under Defense Minister Santos, his indictment in the “false positive” murders, his long term large scale association with the death squads and with the Uribe regimes promotion of narco trafficking. They ignored his support for de-regulating the financial system, resulting in the defrauding of hundreds of thousands of Colombian small investors.

Yet the Financial Times (6/23/2010) favorably compares Colombia under Uribe-Santos against Venezuela under Chavez, “Crackers about Caracas? Latin American should be bonkers about Bogota instead”. According to the FT Venezuela under Chavez is said to be unsafe, authoritarian and economically in decline. The editors of the FT, echoing the rest of the media, claim Colombia is a prosperous democracy, with a system of checks and balances; with safe and peaceful neighborhoods … except when the neighborhoods of the poor protest unemployment or the rural villagers march against land grabs by the landlord funded gunmen. The FT fails to mention the resurgence of paramilitary gangs terrorizing the Colombian countryside, (La Jornada 5/28/2010) but instead they focus on street crime in Caracas.

The fact that the mass-media have so enthusiastically embraced a regime with the worst human rights record since the fall of the military dictators of the 1970’s – 1980’s (La Jornada 6/17/2010) is indicative of the right turn under the Obama Wall Street regime. According to the White House and media, deathsquad democracies like Colombia now qualify as “role models” for Latin America. The problem is that neither the vast majority of Latin America citizens, nor most of the democratic parties in the region are buying: they prefer democracies without deathsquads, foreign military bases and narco-dealing Presidents. At present, the White House’s three leading allies in the region, Colombia, Peru and Mexico produce and sell 80% of the cocaine in the region. Will this appear in the media’s salutations to newly elected presidents?

James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He is the author of 64 books published in 29 languages, and over 560 articles in professional journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Social Research, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Journal of Peasant Studies. He has published over 2000 articles.

(Source: Mycatbirdseat. com)

By James Jordan
Special to The Narco News Bulletin

April 6, 2010

The United States continues to fund and direct a war for Colombia’s natural resources that has become nothing less than a war against the nation’s farmers for their land. It is a war that wreaks havoc and terror throughout the countryside as whole communities are threatened, attacked and displaced. There are five million persons in Colombia who have been displaced mainly because of military and paramilitary violence. Sixty percent of those are farmers and farm workers. At this point in time, rural populations in the departments of Tolima and Arauca appear to be specially slated for repression and forced relocation.

In Colombia, where more unionists are murdered each year than in the rest of the world combined, no one labor federation is harder hit than FENSUAGRO (United Federation of National Agricultural Unions). For FENSUAGRO, no one member union is more affected by assassinations than the Arauca Campesino Association (ACA). On March 10th, ACA member Israel Verona was assassinated in his home in the municipality of Saravena, Arauca at 7am. The following is from an ACA statement announcing the news:

“Since its [ACA’s] formation 10 years ago, year after year the list of assassinations, incarcerations and displacements grows in a frightening manner. Only in November of 2009 our Association lost fifteen comrades murdered by gunmen under the protection of State Forces. They committed these crimes with the most absolute impunity. [Note: According to Jeff Vogt, Global Economic Policy Specialist for the AFL-CIO there were 48 known assassinations of unionists in Colombia in 2009, with at least 515 murdered since Colombian Pres. Álvaro Uribe took office in 2002. More than 95% of those who commit murders of unionists and other acts of political violence are never convicted for their crimes.]

The 10th of March, 2010, we received sad news…another companion from the Arauca Campesino Association was murdered….ISRAEL VERONA, well known rural leader…recognized for his indestructible happiness, his unbreakable constancy and his commitment to the service of the Araucan campesinos….

Israel, who was affectionately known as the “Burro”….was proud of this nickname…and had a long list of the good things that characterize said animal, besides maintaining that the burro, to the contrary of what many think, is a very intelligent animal….

Israel suffered every form of repression utilized by the Colombian state against the social and campesino leaders in order to quiet their just complaints, including forced displacement, persecution and death threats. He was also arrested in the year 2009, accused, like everyone else, by paid informants with the charge of Rebellion…remaining six months in the jail, which he left in January, 2010, absolved of all culpability.” [Note: There have been more than 8,000 provably arbitrary arrests in Colombia since 2002 that were later thrown out of court for lack of evidence. Between 1992 and 2002, there were just 2,000. Arrests are made on the basis of judicial frame ups and paid informers—with one out of every 20 Colombians acting as an informer for the state, according to Gen. Freddy Padilla de León, Commander of the Colombian Armed Forces. The subsequent assassination of falsely arrested political prisoners is all too common an occurrence following their releases from jail.]

In the Department of Tolima, there have been several serious threats and human rights abuses by the Colombian military in recent days against members of ASTRACATOL (Arauca Campesino Workers Association), also a FENSUAGRO affiliate, and against members of the Community Action Councils of the villages of El Piñal, Palmira, Vegas del Café and Café las Pavas. Within the past two years at least two union members have been assassinated and several have been arbitrarily detained.

According to a statement released by FENSUAGRO,

“The communities…declare once again an urgent alert due to the new…outrages and threats exercised against the civilian population by troops of the national army belonging to the 21st Mobile Brigade, which has been present in the zone for two years, bringing with them destructive consequences and dangers….From the moment that they initiated military operations, they provoked damages in the aquaducts that supply water to the populations, damages to the forests that protect the small springs of water that flow into the aquaducts, polluting the same with trash…around the sources of water that the communities consume. This situation is worrisome since the population cannot make any complaint, since whoever complains is immediately threatened with the paramilitaries or categorized as a guerrilla or militia member….It is well known by all the competent authorities that due to these outrages and murders committed by the troops of the army, the population has twice been displaced and has returned because of pacts agreed to between the communities and the authorities…. However, these said accords have not been fulfilled and taking into account the latest events that have occurred, the situation has become much more dangerous….”

The “latest events” referred to above have included the following.

• On March 26th, Units of the 21st Mobile Brigade arrived at the house of a couple working at the farm of Mr. Luis Torres of the village of Vegas del Café. There they accosted Mrs. Marilín Ramírez and her husband for two hours threatening them and saying things such as, “You seem like guerrillas”.
• The 29th of March, some 15 to 20 soldiers, at five in the morning, assaulted the Ramírez brothers in their house where they were sleeping, beating their rifles against the windows, pounding on the door and shooting two times into the house, while shouting for the brothers to “exit the house so we can fill you with lead!”. This went on about an hour. When the three brothers (Carlos and José Yesid Ramírez Romero and Darwin Vanegas) went to complain to the military, they were again threatened that they would be “filled with lead at any moment”. An hour after this, José Yesid, an adolescent, on his way to work was again threatened by one of the troops that had attacked his house. He was detained again and told that “one of these days we will take you and fill your body with lead.”
• Also on March 29th…. at six in the evening, army units detained the youth Darío Ortigoza Mayorga, 16 years of age. They tied his arms with a rope and threatened to kill him, accusing him of being a guerrilla and took his identification card. An hour later they set him free, without returning the identification card. On March 30th, in the morning hours, Mr. Nelson Ortigoza found a black bag in a well with the younger Ortigoza’s (Darío) identification card, accompanied by a note that said, “Hello, son of a Whore. I saved you from death because I know you are a guerrilla. Here are your papers, you son of a whore. Listen, son of a whore—the next time you will not be saved. The National Army.” It was signed with an illegible signature. Members of the community were reminded of similar events in 2005 and 2006 that culminated with the deaths of the youths Mario Guerrero and Héctor Yate, murdered by soldiers from the Colombian armed forces. Community members have declared that they will engage in civil disobedience before allowing more deaths at the hands of the military.

What is at stake in both Arauca and Tolima are natural resources coveted by transnational corporations. Tolima is itself a major producer of rice, cotton and coffee, containing vast arrays of desirable farmland, and it has important gold deposits. The mountain municipality of Dolores, where the villages of El Piñal, Palmira, Vegas del Café and Café las Pavas are located, is one of the department’s most important producers of coffee. It is also the site of recently discovered oil deposits, the quantities of which have not yet been fully ascertained.

In November, 2008, ASTRACATOL and a number of leading labor and human rights organizations, signed a statement detailing a long list of abuses by the Army’s 21st Mobile Brigade, including ongoing contamination and disruption of the water supply and threats and arbitrary detentions against community members spuriously accused of being members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The local school that served the villages was closed when its one teacher was kidnapped and tortured and forced to abandon the region. The school was vandalized with graffiti saying, “You guerrilla dogs are going to die”. Inside, “21st Mobile Brigade” had been cut into several desks and tables.

The Departments of Arauca and neighboring Casanare contain the bulk of Colombia’s known oil reserves, and Arauca itself accounts for 30% of the country’s entire oil output. In December, 2006, meeting in Saravena, the Preliminary Hearing for the People’s Permanent Tribunal on Petroleum in Colombia issued a report stating that, “The gigantic investments of transnational capital, principally on the part of Occidental Petroleum Company, British Petroleum, Amoco and REPSOL, and the need to guarantee the exploitation of the natural resource, have been the principal motives behind the militarization and have put in march the policy of Democratic Security in departments such as Arauca, Boyacá, North Santander and Casanare.” [NOTE: Democratic Security is a policy adopted by the administration of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe that, in the name of security, seeks a military only solution to the nation’s conflicts, rather than a process for dialogue and peace negotiations. Also, a number of corporations, including Occidental, have been directly linked to paying paramilitaries for services such as, in Occidental’s case, guarding pipelines.]

We must consider the threats and assassinations in Tolima and Arauca in light of ongoing scandals involving the Colombian military. Even more important is that we bear in mind the culpability of the US government, which has given over $7 billion dollars in military and related aid to Colombia over the past 10 years and which trains, advises, accompanies and directs the Colombian military in the prosecution of this War on Colombia’s Farmers.

In August, 2009, I was traveling in Colombia leading a delegation for the Alliance for Global Justice. Earlier that year, the “false positive” scandal broke, incriminating some 30 members of the Colombian military, including three generals and the Commander of the Colombian Army. This scandal revealed as many as 2,000 civilians known to have been murdered and afterwards dressed in guerrilla clothing and claimed as enemy combatants. Most of those arrested for this crime have since been let out of jail on technicalities. During the delegation, we saw footage taken after the Colombian military had killed two teenagers in their home in the community of Corinto, Cauca. The local population had surrounded the site, videotaped it, and would not allow the military personnel to leave until the scene had been investigated. Eventually, the military was found responsible for the murders, but no one was actually arrested or sentenced. [NOTE: The Alliance for Global Justice is planning another delegation to Colombia August 1-11, to investigate conditions for farmers. For more information write james@afgj.org.]

Now a new scandal is developing regarding the discovery in late January of a mass grave in La Macarena, in the Department of Meta. The grave was dug by the Colombian military and contains some 2,000 corpses. The military (again) claims these are the bodies of guerrillas killed in battle. However, they were buried with no attempts to identify the remains and out of compliance with all proper protocols. The grave was discovered as a result of children becoming sick after drinking run-off from a stream located by the site.

One thing we can be certain of is that we only know the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the level of violence by paramilitary and military forces in Colombia—which together are responsible for 70 to 80% of political violence any given year. For instance, in addition to confirmed deaths, since 1980 to the present, some 25,000 to 35,000 persons have been “disappeared”. According to Jairo Ramirez, Executive Secretary for Colombia’s Permanent Committee on Human Rights, “The majority of those killed are buried in 3,500 unmarked graves or cremated to remove all traces.” Ramirez told our delegation that the paramilitary commander Salvatore Mancuso, who was extradited to the United States, had claimed that Colombian “…generals had suggested cremation to the paramilitaries to keep reports of numbers down. Another way to remove traces is to cut bodies into pieces and throw them into rivers.”

What we can see from these three examples—the false positive scandal, the unidentified bodies dumped in the La Macarena grave site, and the collusion of the military and paramilitaries in hiding the remains of the “disappeared”—is that allegations of guerrilla activity by the Colombian government and military simply cannot be accepted at face value. The justification given for the occupation of these villages in Tolima is that the forces are there to battle the guerrillas. And the charges that villagers are guerrillas is the justification for the arbitrary detentions, abuses and attacks of civilians. Likewise, it is in the name of fighting the insurgents that farmers are being assassinated in Arauca.

Right now, tensions are high in Tolima and Arauca. Villagers in Dolores are afraid that murder and displacement are to follow and ASTRACATOL and FENSUAGRO have felt the necessity of alerting the international community. In Arauca, ACA members find themselves in the most targeted union not only in Colombia, but in the world.

There is much that the people of the Unites States can do to help this situation. One place to start is by contacting the Colombian Embassy, the White House and our Senators and Representatives and telling them something like this:

“I demand that the threats and acts of violence against farmers in Tolima and Arauca be brought to an end. Last year, 15 members of the Association of Campesinos in Arauca were murdered by members of paramilitaries and the Colombian military. In the municipality of Dolores, Tolima, there have been repeated assaults against members of the farmers’ union, ASTRACATOL, by the Colombian Army’s 21st Mobile Brigade. Twice the people of the affected villages there have been forced to leave their homes and twice they have come back after making agreements with the military and government officials guaranteeing their security—but the threats continue. In both cases—in Tolima and Arauca—rural populations are terrorized where there are oil, mining and farming resources coveted by foreign, transnational interests.

I demand that the Colombian authorities act to end paramilitary and military violence against these communities and that all perpetrators be brought to justice.

I demand that our elected officials in the United States end all aid to Colombia, especially military aid, until that government has stopped abuses of farmers and union members. I further demand the US support dialogue and negotiations for a just peace in Colombia rather than sponsoring this devastating and failed war.”

Part of Uribe’s international campaign to criminalise solidarity, is a violent cultural campaign of deceit, led by the corporate media. Censorship and right-wing propaganda from the Colombian government is aired in main news outlets and targeting also new media such as the internet, You Tube and weblogs. Uribe’s latest event has been via the the Colombian Foreign Ministry to intensify their propaganda war against FARC Marxist guerrillas and what the Uribe government terms the FARC’s “parallel diplomacy.” Colombian Foreign Ministry Jaime Bermúdez, called home 29 Colombian ambassadors (plus 12 other that were connected via video conference) to draft an agenda of combating this “diplomacy” and prevent the screening of a recently released Argentinean production titles “La insurgencia del siglo XXI” (The insurgency of the 21st Century). The documentary that depicts the rebel group as an organization made up of peasants, indigenous, afro-Colombian men and women, their work with the land and hold revolutionary points of view about Colombian society. The screening of the film has been banned, and the Ambassadors and their collaborators have the task of prevent the film of being distributed.  Despites Uribe´s efforts, a number of countries including Argentina, Cuba, Uruguay, Ecuador, Spain, Italy, France, Denmark, Turkey, and possibly others have already seen the film. In Argentina and Cuba the documentary premiered in nationa  Film festivals.

According to the Colombian Foreign Ministry, to screen or watch this video is considered “a statement in defence of crime”. What is dangerous from such declarations are the actions taken by some countries in response to these initiatives. This happens at a time when Uribe has accepted seven US military bases that include the use of air and navy forces, contractors and security forces which threaten not only the Colombian people, but the entire region.

The delegitimization and defamation campaign is also a major component of Uribe´s propaganda war, sometimes with judicial consequences. Colombian intellectuals have been jailed. On August 2008, film-maker and human rights defender Liliany Obando (who toured Australia in two occasions) was detained, being the first victim of Uribe´s so-called “FARC-politica” in response to ongoing political scandals in Colombia linking Uribe with paramilitary death squads, drug trafficking, and other damning activities. Liliany is yet to be tried in court and she remains in a high security prison to date. On May 2009, Professor Miguel Ángel Beltrán was illegally extradited from México to Colombia, accused of being a “FARC-Intellectual” for his criticism of the Colombian government. Beltrán  was jailed with no trial and has now been reported as disappeared. These cases add to the over 7,500 political prisoners languishing in Colombian prisons.

Outside Colombia, several human rights advocates and solidarity activists had also been interrogated or harassed. In Spain on July 2008, pacifist activist María Remedios García Albert was temporarily jailed for alleged links to the rebel organization. At the time, Gen. Oscar Naranjo, chief of the Colombian Police declared that “that capture was the first in a series of detentions that will be carried out in Europe, of people linked to the FARC”; following that first detention, houses of Colombian activists in Switzerland were raided. To date, the Colombian Government have failed in providing evidence of such connections. During 2008 and 2009, solidarity activists in Chile, México and Peru were harassed with their pictures constantly appearing in the national media without any incriminatory evidence. On January this year, American writer and Colombia solidarity activist James Jordan was escorted out of a plane while returning home from Haiti. US Homeland Security officials interrogated him about solidarity work with Colombia. On February this year, an Australian activist was also  interrogated by the Australian Federal Police on request of the Colombian National Police. This is not the first time that an Australian activist has been interrogated for solidarity work with Colombia as it has been the main focus for the interrogators.

This Uribe campaign, carried out on a global scale, is unprecedented for the current “post-military junta period” in Latin America as it resembles  ‘Operation Condor’ throughout the 1970s and 1980s which involved the clandestine work of US sponsored state-terror carried out by military and secret services of several Southern Cone regimes. In the 1970s and 1980s the pretext of the Cold War was used to carry out repressive and horrific crimes against humanity that involved the deportation, incarceration, torture, “disappearance,” and murder of both common people and revolutionaries for their alleged support of  “terrorism.” Today, in the context of an asymmetrical global US ”War on Terror” where there is “no clear” enemy, it has become very easy for some police and intelligence agencies to declare anyone a “criminal” or a “terrorist.” Without evidence and with only suspicion, this intelligence work has been carried out by local security and police forces and violates the basic civil liberties of freedom of speech and freedom of organisation. Put simply, it threatens the rights of people to demand much needed social justice.

March 6 marks the day to protest against State Terror in Colombia, called by the Movement of Victims of State Crimes (Colombia). On the first week of March, there would be a number of different activities campaigning against extrajudicial executions of young people (who are killed, dressed up and presented as guerrilla fighters, in an attempt of showing with “numbers” the success of Uribe′s counter-insurgent efforts) , and against the criminalisation of international solidarity and critical thinking.

© Peace & Justice for Colombia (copy left)

This article can be posted in other sites, but please quote the reference

This past summer, President Obama announced that he had signed an agreement with Colombia to grant the U.S. military access to 7 military bases in Colombia. As the UK’s Guardian newspaper announced at the time, “[t]he proposed 10-year lease will give the US access to at least seven Colombian bases – three air force, two naval and two army – stretching from the Pacific to the Caribbean.” And, these bases would accommodate up to 800 military and 600 civilian contractors of the United States. As the Guardian explained, this announcement caused outrage in neighboring Latin American nations and “damaged Barack Obama’s attempt to mend relations with the region.”

This announcement also angered human and labor rights advocates in both the U.S. and Colombia as the U.S. was now solidifying a cozier military alliance with by far the worst labor and human rights abuser in the Western Hemisphere. The human rights nightmare in Colombia, fueled by billions of dollars of U.S. military assistance, includes the forced internal displacement of nearly 4 million civilians – the second largest internally displaced population in the world (Sudan holding the number one position); the extraordinary killing of over 2700 union members since 1986 (by far the greatest number in the world), with 35 being killed in 2009 alone; and the extrajudicial killing of around 2,000 civilians by the Colombian military since President Uribe took office in 2002.

As for the extra-judicial killings by the Colombian military, these were carried out as part of the “false positive” scandal – a controversy involving the military murdering civilians and then dressing them up to look like guerillas in order to increase their body count numbers, thereby guaranteeing further U.S. aid. That scandal deepened earlier this month when 31 Colombian soldiers awaiting trial for their role in the killings were released from prison because of the Colombian government’s failure to indict them in a timely fashion.

While the U.S. has claimed for years that it is fighting a drug war in Colombia, though having to sheepishly admit year after year that its ostensible efforts have not yielded any decrease whatsoever in the amount of coca grown in Colombia or cocaine exported to the U.S., the real reason for the war has always been the control of Colombia’s rich oil resources. Indeed, at a Congressional hearing in 2000, entitled “Drugs and Social Policy in Colombia” – a hearing to debate the relative merits of Clinton’s new Plan Colombia, pursuant to which the U.S. has sent billions of dollars of military assistance to Colombia – one of the key witnesses invited to testify in support of this policy was none other than Lawrence Meriage, the Vice-President of Occidental Petroleum. Not surprisingly, Mr. Meriage had nothing to say about drugs or social policy in Colombia, but a lot to say about the need for military assistance to protect his oil pipelines.

Now, according to a January 19, 2010 Bloomberg article, “The Export-Import Bank of the United States [a U.S. government agency] announced Jan. 19 its approval of a $1 billion preliminary commitment to help finance the sale of goods and services from various U.S. exporters to Ecopetrol S.A., Colombia’s national oil company.” It should be noted that Ecopetrol is a business partner with L.A.-based Occidental Petroleum.

Citing an industry expert, the Bloomberg article goes on to explain that “Ecopetrol is being aggressive in exploration and production,” and that, with the help of the financing from the Export-Import Bank, “Ecopetrol will almost double to 1 million barrels daily by 2015 as the company drills more wells in Colombia and neighboring South American nations.”

As a November 12, 2009 press release from the human rights group Amazon Watch explained, Ecopetrol is currently engaged in oil exploration on the sacred land of the U’wa indigenous peoples and against their wishes. A spokesperson for the U’Wa explained that, as is invariably the case, with Ecopetrol’s exploration and drilling comes the Colombian military, as well as paramilitaries, to protect Ecopetrol’s operations.

As Ecopetrol’s own website indicates, it is also involved in oil exploration in Peru and Brazil. As for Peru, Survival International, a UK-based human rights group advocating for the rights of threatened indigenous tribes, warned last year that Ecopetrol’s exploration of the Peruvian Amazon jungle threatens hitherto uncontacted indigenous tribes whose very existence will be jeopardized by these operations. As Survival International explained, these uncontacted tribes are “exceedingly vulnerable to any contact with outsiders because of their lack of immunity to disease.” Prior contacts between companies and uncontacted tribes have resulted in the mortality of 50% of the tribe.

While the current U.S. Administration seems bent on deepening its fatal ties to Colombia in the interest of oil, there is still an opportunity to derail this policy. Pursuant to the statute which created and regulates the U.S. Export-Import Bank, the President of the U.S. (who, by a 1979 Executive Order, delegated such authority to the Secretary of State) may, after consultation with the House and Senate Committees on Banking, determine that an application for credit should be denied by the Bank if the extension of credit “clearly and importantly” impacts U.S. “policy in such areas as international terrorism, nuclear proliferation, environmental protection and human rights.” 12 U.S.C. Sec. 635(2)(b)(1)(B).

Clearly, the prelimimary decision to extend credit to Ecopetrol adversely impacts human rights and the environment and should be overturned as a result. A movement to halt this extension of credit on these grounds would be a worthy effort for the U.S. peace and solidarity groups. Similarly, there is still a chance to impede the U.S.’s decision to access 7 new military bases in Colombia. With the Administration reeling from the election results in Massachusetts last week, now is the time to try to shame it into reversing course on its predictably devastating policy in Colombia and the rest of Latin America.

Daniel Kovalik is a labor and human rights lawyer working in Pittsburgh, Pa.

STOP THE HARASSMENT OF POLITICAL PRISONERS & THEIR SUPPORTERS. SILENCE IS NOT AN ALTERNATIVE

Dear friends:

For your information, we have become aware of an incident involving our friend Kevin Neish, a Canadian human rights observer who is currently in Colombia visiting some political prisoners and observing the trial of Liliany Obando. Her public hearing scheduled for 18/19 & 27^th January was cancelled because the “Fiscalia” (Prosecution) failed to provide a copy of the prosecution evidence against Liliany to her defense team. The case was adjourned until 15/16^th February.

Kevin has been visiting the “El Buen Pastor Women’s prison patio 6” since September 2009 on at least six occasions without any incident. However on Saturday the 23rd of January he was asked to produce a document showing his fingerprint with the argument that his Canadian passport was not sufficient to allow a visit.

He complained that this was an abuse against the right of the prisoner to receive visitors as the rules were concocted preventing him from having access to Patio 6. Patio 6 is the prison’s yard where the political prisoners are held.

A plain clothed official spoke to him advising he could see a prisoner but in the interview room. The usual custom of prison visits is inside the yard on a normal visiting day. This mode of visitation allows the prisoners some sense of dignity and freedom, as they are able to share their lives and community with their visitors.  The new requirements implemented that day without warning now stand and are applicable to all future International visitors who must have this additional document showing the right thumb fingerprint. Kevin was allowed to visit again on Saturday 30^th January after he produced the newly required document.

We denounce that rules can be changed arbitrarily to obstruct and disrupt visitation rights, a basic human right of the prisoner.

This is just another act of harassment against political prisoners. These prisoners are often the most likely to receive international visits and when those visits are prevented without proper reason it must be seen as an abuse of power.

This harassment is yet another attempt in a long list to criminalise international solidarity. This list includes the recent questioning of activists in the United States, Canada and Australia, the ongoing ‘hate’ messages sent via email and the Free Liliany Website.

• We demand the end to the harassment of political prisoners and their supporters.
• We condemn the attempts to criminalise international solidarity.
• We call on all supporters and human rights organisations to remain vigilant and demand that the Uribe government end all repression and respect human rights of political prisoners in Colombia.

Free Liliany Obando and all political prisoners. Humanitarian Exchange Now!

Many analysts and sectors of the mainstream media have suggested that the apparent ineffectiveness of the U.S. government to resolve the crisis in Honduras is evidence that the influence wielded by the region’s superpower is waning. They argue that the assertiveness of Brazil in its efforts to have Honduras’ coup regime step down and re-instate the country’s democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya illustrates how the balance of power in the region has shifted. But such conclusions might well be premature. After all, given the stubbornness of the coup regime headed by Roberto Micheletti, it could be argued that it is the United States, and by extension its ally Colombia, that are getting their way in Honduras and not Brazil and its leftist allies Venezuela and Bolivia.Many of those who suggest that the Honduran crisis is an example of Washington’s waning influence in Central American affairs, including Time Magazine and the Los Angeles Times, point to the ineffectiveness of the Obama administration to resolve the situation. There is of course an assumption that the Obama administration and Congress actually want the re-instatement of Zelaya as president. But the administration’s actions following the June 28 coup—and the rhetoric of many members of Congress—contradict this assumption. The Obama administration refused to label Zelaya’s overthrow as a military coup even though Honduran troops seized the president and forced him to leave the country. Labelling Zelaya’s ouster a military coup would have required that the Obama administration immediately cut-off all military and economic aid to Honduras. The United States did eventually cut military and economic aid to the coup regime but refused to withdraw its ambassador.

Also following the coup, Obama and his secretary of state Hilary Clinton called for a negotiated settlement to the crisis rather than the unconditional return to office of the country’s democratically-elected president as most other countries around the world were demanding. Given Zelaya’s close ties to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Washington was not eager to see to Zelaya re-instated in the presidential palace. Despite carefully structured statements intended to suggest that the United States was supporting democracy, its support for negotiations and its lack of firm action clearly illustrated that the Obama administration had no intention of pressuring the coup regime to unconditionally surrender power. In August, Zelaya noted Washington’s unwillingness to defend democracy in Honduras stating that “the United States only needs to tighten its fist and the coup will last five seconds.”

Meanwhile, several Republican members of Congress have openly supported the coup regime and have worked hard to influence the Obama administration’s response to the crisis. Florida Congressman Connie Mack, the ranking Republican on the U.S. House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, visited Honduras in July and met with Micheletti. Mack declared that Hondurans “don’t want us to stand with the ‘thugocrats’ of the Western Hemisphere like Hugo Chávez.” In early October, four more U.S. Republican lawmakers visited Micheletti in Honduras’ presidential palace in a show of support for the coup regime.

Washington’s close ally Colombia is the other country in the hemisphere that has been reluctant to pressure the coup regime in Honduras. In fact, the Uribe government welcomed a delegation from the coup regime and, according to members of the delegation, Colombian officials stated their support for the new Honduran government. Additionally, more than $6 billion in U.S. military aid over the past decade has strengthened the Colombian military to the point that it is now less reliant on right-wing paramilitary death squads to carry out its dirty war. As a result, the Uribe government was able to “demobilize” many of the country’s paramilitaries in recent years because the U.S.-backed military has assumed a more direct role in the perpetration of human rights abuses. The supposedly demobilized paramilitaries are now free to offer their services to help protect the interests of rich landowners and industrialists in other countries. This is exactly what has occurred in Honduras as more than 40 Colombian paramilitaries have been imported to protect the economic interests of the elites with what appears to be the acquiescence of the right-wing coup regime.

Meanwhile, Brazil has attempted to assert itself as a major regional player in the crisis. Brazil’s President Inacio “Lula” da Silva has openly called for the re-instatement of Zelaya, as have other South American leftist presidents such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales. When Zelaya secretly returned to Honduras on September 21 he took refuge in the Brazilian embassy in the capital Tegucigalpa. Brazilian president Lula warned the coup regime not to enter the embassy and to respect its diplomatic status, thereby allowing Zelaya to remain in Honduras.

It is the assertiveness of Brazil and the apparent inaction of the United States that has led many to point to the Honduran crisis as an example of Washington’s declining influence in Central America. But Brazil’s efforts have so far amounted to little as the Honduran coup regime has stubbornly remained in power. Therefore, given the Obama administration’s apparent lack of desire to have Zelaya unconditionally re-instated as president, the continuance of the coup regime in power suggests that it is the Obama administration that is actually achieving its political objectives in Honduras—while simultaneously portraying itself as a defender of democracy with its half-hearted condemnations of Zelaya’s ouster.

The Honduran crisis has not provided any clear evidence that U.S. influence in Central America has decreased significantly. The nature of that influence has shifted over the years from supporting brutal military dictatorships to “democracy promotion” policies that ensured adherence by the region’s governments to the Washington Consensus and to inaction when it suits U.S. political and economic interests, as is the case with Honduras. A more accurate measure of Washington’s influence in the region will come when an allied right-wing government is violently overthrown. The response of the United States and its ideological allies to such a crisis will more accurately inform us as to whether Washington’s inaction in Honduras is due to a waning of influence or is simply an effective strategic ploy.

For more information, please see:

For half a century, the United States and its client state in Colombia have been unsuccessful in eliminating Latin America’s oldest and most powerful Marxist insurgency the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), via the Cold War, the ‘War on Drugs,’ and the ‘War on Terror’ after 9/11. This is an astonishing feat for a so-called ‘terrorist’ organisation in the twenty-first century. This paper will explore an area much eluded in Washington’s ‘Axis of Evil,’ the US ‘War on Narcoterrorism’ in Colombia with a particular focus on the cocaine drug trade and the FARC.

Field of Research: Latin American Studies, Political Economy, American Foreign Policy, International Relations.

1. Introduction

For half a century, the United States and its client state in Colombia have been unsuccessful in eliminating Latin America’s oldest and most powerful Marxist insurgency the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), via the Cold War, the ‘War on Drugs,’ and the ‘War on Terror’ after 9/11. This is an astonishing feat for a so-called ‘terrorist’ organisation in the twenty-first century. This paper will explore an area much eluded in Washington’s ‘Axis of Evil,’ the US ‘War on Narcoterrorism’ in Colombia with a particular focus on the cocaine drug trade and the FARC.

2. Literature Review

The paper evaluates available literature and evidence on the cocaine drug trade, the Colombian civil conflict, and the US ‘War on Drugs and Terror.’ Since the ‘cocaine decade’ between 1980 and 1989, the importance of cocaine to the political economy of Colombia was met with an increase of insurgent activity by FARC and other left-wing rebel organisations. United States government funding for Colombian security forces also increased throughout this period.

3. Methodology and Research Design

The research explored a critical aspect of the Colombian civil conflict that is confronting the Colombian state and its key political and military backer, the United States government. The paper offers an alternative framework underpinned by a class-historical analysis of the development of the drug economy and the FARC.

4. Discussion

During the Cold War and throughout the history of US foreign policy, the United States has intervened in more states in Latin America than in any other continent, with US-sponsored counterinsurgency the primary means of US coercive statecraft (Schoultz, 1998). The US considers Latin America as its own ‘backyard.’ George Kennan, America’s Cold War strategy planner and designer of ‘containment,’ explained that in dealing with Communism in Latin America, the final solution, ‘may be an unpleasant one’ but the US ‘should not hesitate before police repression by the local government.’ For Kennan, it was ‘better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists’ (Kennan quoted in Schmitz, 1999, p. 149). From a military science standpoint, Colombia – not Vietnam – has been America’s longest and most enduring counterinsurgency war up to date.

The picture in Colombia is dominated by the view that the US and Colombian governments are at war with left-wing terrorists funded by the cocaine drug trade i.e. ‘narcoterrorists.’ As in the Middle East, the fact that a US counterinsurgency is being waged in an ‘Axis of Oil’ only this time in its own ‘backyard’ is hardly disputed by progressive writers (see for instance, Scott, 2003; Murillo, 2004; Livingstone, 2004; Stokes, 2005; Leech, 2006; Wilpert, 2007). Colombia is the seventh largest supplier of oil to the United States and shares with Venezuela and Ecuador the Venezuela-Orinoco belt, one of the largest pools of hydrocarbons in the world (Murillo, 2004; Hylton, 2006). But ‘big oil’ alone cannot fully explain the US logic for waging the world’s most expensive war after the wars of the Middle East (which also includes financing US allies Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, and Jordan) (The Center for Public Integrity, Collateral Damage: Human Rights and U.S. Military Aid After 9/11: http://projects.publicintegrity.org/militaryaid/).

Colombia shares with Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador the ‘Crystal Triangle’ – the world’s coca producing zone – making Colombia the world’s number one producer of processed cocaine by supplying 100 percent to American streets and 76 percent globally (Lee, 2002; Changing Dynamics of Cocaine Production in the Andean Region, Drug Intelligence Brief, US Drug Enforcement Administration, Jun. 2002). This is the leading exponent of the US ‘War on Drugs-War on Terror-Narcoterrorism’ in the Western Hemisphere.

To understand the contemporary Colombian conflict properly, it is important to revisit some relevant history and facts about this Andean nation. Since the Spanish Conquest, landowners and merchants have played a powerful role in Colombian economic life (Zamosc, 1986). A system of colonial exploitation called the hacienda was introduced developing a rural class structure of Spanish landlords and landless campesinos (peasants). In the hacienda system, the colonisation of land by the property owners was met with militant resistance by the poor peasantry. For the exploited classes land meant freedom, and when Simon Bolivar’s wars of independence against Spanish rule swept Latin America, the landlords of Colombia pledged their allegiance to Spain (McFarlane, 1993).

The hacienda system, however, created its own internal contradictions, the colonos (landless workers) and the poor peasantry struggling for land. The result of this phase of struggle was a class society based on sizes of land ownership that in the early twentieth century appeared as follows: minifundias in the highlands, mixed patterns of production in the slopes, and latifundias in the plains (Sanchez, 1984).

The class struggle over land erupted during a period known in Colombian history as La Violencia (1948-1958), when the compradors in their struggle against the landless workers and peasantry split along political, ideological, and regional lines in their own parliamentary political system (Richani, 2002). By the 1940s, a power struggle within the Colombian ruling class determined the fate of Colombian politics. Old rivalries between the two major political parties in the parliament, the Liberals and Conservatives, noticed this struggle. Amidst this parliamentary infighting, a Liberal presidential candidate named Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, enjoyed popular appeal. His message was to the people against the oligarchy, the ‘real country’ against the ‘political country’ (Pearce, 1990; Livingstone, 2003; FARC-EP, 2000). For the ‘oligarchy,’ populism in any form was tantamount to Communist subversion and required state repression. It reached a climax when Gaitan was gunned down on April 9, 1948. His assassination, believed to be the first crime organised by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Colombia, spurred a major uprising called the Bogotázo (Atherton, 2003; Idels, 2002; FARC-EP, 2000).

Liberals and leftists alike blamed the ruling Conservative government for Gaitan’s assassination. Workers, the middle class, and common people stormed the city attacking anything which symbolised a government that excluded and impoverished them instigating La Violencia (Peace, 1990). The upsurge convulsed the country and liberal landowners organised peasant-guerrilla armies. Paramilitary groups comprised of civilians and police carried out military operations (Richani, 2002). Unions retaliated by organising self-defence groups in the mountains. The Communist Party reorganised the peasant resistance including the foundation of guerrilla camps under the political leadership of the Communist Party aligned to Moscow (Peace, 1990). With the support of the US, the Colombian military responded by destroying the encampment while survivors were forced to flee to distant zones (Pearce, 1990; FARC-EP, 2000).

On May 18, 1964, the US guided and financed counterinsurgency campaign began when Colombian Armed Forces surrounded and attacked Marquetalia, the principal rebel agrarian community (Schneider, 2000). Labelling these autonomous communities as ‘independent republics,’ the Colombian government sent 16,000 troops, accompanied by tanks, helicopters, and warplanes, and carried out bombing campaigns against the departments of Marquetalia, Rio Chiquito, El Pato-Guayabero, and Santa Barbara. The Communist Party and peasant rebels retreated to the agricultural frontiers in Amazonia where the state had a limited presence (Schneider, 2000; Rabasa & Chalk, 2001; Kirk, 2003).

La Violencia made an important impact on land ownership in Colombia. The landless remained landless and the power of the landlords was assured with a dominant position in the nation’s body politic. Political opposition was outlawed and repressed. Rewarded by the United States with financial support, Colombia was labelled a ‘showcase’ for the ‘Alliance for Progress’ of 1961, which saw huge expansions in commercial agriculture and landowners highly represented in the government (Randall, 1992).

The US moved along two tracks in the early 1960s: to overthrow Cuba and neutralise revolutionary movements throughout the region; and to launch the ‘Alliance for Progress’ – promoted as a free market solution to poverty but serving only to deepen US economic penetration of Latin America (Hylton, 2006). The irony of its results was that the Colombian and US government in the 1960s and 1970s actually sought to achieve their free market reforms to prevent a Colombian revolution. These radical political developments led to the founding of the FARC in 1964 by La Violencia veterans, Jacobo Arenas and Manuel Marulanda Velez (nom de guerre – ‘sure shot’), the former Chief Commandant of Central High Command, and other armed groups, the National Liberation Army (ELN), the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), and M-19 soon after.

The agrarian class conflict that begun during Spanish rule persists to the present – between the peasantry seeking to colonise lands – and the landlords who resist this process (Sanchez, 1984). Between 1970 and 1982 the FARC grew from the 500 who survived the old wave of state terror to a peasant army of 3,000. The campesinos stood in the parameters of class struggle, whilst an emerging drug economy throughout the ‘cocaine decade’ of the 1980s provided an opportunity to relieve their pauperisation by beginning to grow coca. While no legal crop offered the advantages of growing and selling coca for the campesinos, cocaine became a lucrative and ever expanding industry that produced an emerging ‘narcobourgeoisie’ in Colombia (Richani, 2002).

The ‘cocaine decade’ witnessed a period of continual state-terror with the use of right-wing paramilitary death squads, when the FARC and sectors of the Colombian left signed a peace pact with the government to engage in electoral politics. Approximately 5,000 activists and leaders, including two presidential candidates of the FARC’s political party the Union Patriotica (UP) were exterminated (Petras, 2000; Molano, 2000). It was during this time when Colombia’s current President, Alvaro Uribe Velez, began his political career by granting pilot licenses to drug traffickers as head of the aviation company Aerocivil (Hylton, 2003). With the support of his father, Alberto Uribe Sierra, Alvaro Uribe made his most important contacts with the emerging ‘narcobourgeoisie’ as head of Aerocivil. Uribe Sierra became a household name when he was indicted for his involvement in the widely reported raid on a cocaine-processing laboratory in Tranquilandia (Hylton, 2003).

Uribe Sierra owned extensive cattle ranches in Antioquia and Cordoba and became a real-estate intermediary for the Medellin drug cartel led by Pablo Escobar. When he was killed by FARC guerrillas at his ranch in 1983, Alvaro Uribe flew there in Pablo Escobar’s helicopter (Contreras & Garavito, 2002). His father’s wealth and connections to the underworld practically assured him a place in Colombia’s emerging nascent form narco-state (Hylton, 2003).

Alvaro Uribe Velez’s political career grew by providing known traffickers such as Pablo Escobar with local distributors. When Uribe’s attendance at a cartel meeting in Escobar’s hacienda Napoles was made public, Uribe was removed from his post as mayor (Contreras & Garavito, 2002). But between 1995 and 1997 he became governor of Antioquía and helped set up a paramilitary force called Convivir, later controlled by the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), an umbrella right-wing paramilitary organisation. Uribe’s right hand man, Pedro Juan Moreno Villa, was Colombia’s leading importer of potassium permanganate, the main precursor chemical in the manufacture of cocaine (El Spectador Sep. 1, 2002).

A recently declassified major report by the US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 1991, ranked Uribe number 82 from a list of 104 ‘most important Colombian narcoterrorists contracted by the [Colombian narcotics cartels] for security, transportation, distribution, collection and enforcement of narcotics operations in both the US and Colombia.’ The report states:

No. 82. Alvaro Uribe Velez – A Colombian politician and senator dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin Cartel at high government levels. Uribe was linked to a business involved in narcotics activities in the U.S. His father was murdered in Colombia for his connection with the narcotics traffickers. Uribe has worked for the Medellin Cartel and is a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar Gaviria. He has participated in Escobar’s political campaign to win the position of assistant parliamentarian to Jorge (Ortega). Uribe has been one of the politicians, from the Senate, who has attacked all forms of the extradition treaty (US Intelligence Listed Colombian President Uribe Among ‘Important Colombian Narco-Traffickers in 1991,’ Confidential, p. 2, The National Security Archive, Georgetown University, Aug. 2, 2004: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB131/index.htm).

The US and Colombian governments’ allegation that FARC are ‘narcoterrorists’ was first devised by Rachel Ehrenfeld of the American Center for Democracy. Ehrenfeld is a member of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a neo-conservative lobby group chaired by former CIA Director James Woolsey. After 9/11, CPD became an influential lobby group which alleged the existence of a Saddam Hussein – Al Qaeda link (Asia Times Jun. 23, 2006). During the ‘cocaine decade,’ Ehrenfeld published three books on ‘narcoterrorism’[1]

A major report produced by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs found no evidence of FARC involvement in drug trafficking, its main findings, however, pointed to extensive drug smuggling to the United States by ‘right-wing paramilitary groups in collaboration with wealthy drug barons, the armed forces, key financial figures and senior government bureaucrats’ (Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Aug. 1999). Congressional testimony by James Milford, former Deputy Administrator of the DEA, argued there is little to indicate the drug trafficking claim, ‘The FARC controls certain areas of Colombia and the FARC in those regions generate revenue by taxing local drug related activities’ (James Milford – DEA Congressional Testimony, House of International Relations Committee, Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, Jul 16, 1997). This view is supported by Klaus Nyholm, the Director of the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP) which has agents throughout the drug producing regions.

He argues that local FARC fronts are ‘quite autonomous,’ and in some areas ‘they are not involved at all’ in coca production which is not cocaine production, and in others ‘they actually tell the farmers not to grow coca’ (The Washington Post Apr. 17, 2000, p. 3). Ricardo Vargas of the Transnational Institute (TNI), an independent research centre which specialises in drug issues in Colombia, describes the role of the FARC as ‘primarily focused on the taxation of illicit crops,’ where the guerrillas have called for a development plan for the peasants that would ‘allow eradication of coca on the basis of alternative crops’ (Vargas, 1999).

FARC’s power and influence is estimated to extend across 60 percent of the country according to recent figures (Brittain, 2005). It was estimated that in less than three years over 93 percent of all regions of recent settlement in Colombia had a guerrilla presence (Bergquist, Penaranda, &  Sánchez, 2003; Richani, 2002). In the department of Cundinamarca, which completely surrounds the capital city of Bogotá, FARC extends throughout 83 of the department’s 116 municipalities. Some areas are formally organised by the FARC with schools, medical facilities, grassroots judicial structures and other social projects. According to fieldwork conducted in Colombia:

The FARC, unlike many recent revolutionary movements and struggles in Central and South America, is a peasant-based, organised, and maintained revolutionary organisation. The revolutionaries were not formed within classrooms or churches; they are not a movement led or consisting of lawyers, students, doctors, or priests. Rather, the FARC’s leadership, support-base, and membership comes from the very soil from which it provides its subsistence, for the insurgents largely consist of peasants from rural Colombia, who account for approximately 65 percent of its members (Brittain, 2005, p. 23).

The present Uribe government has been implicated in a series of ‘Parapolitica’ (AUC paramilitary connected) scandals which involves an International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation (Plan Colombia and Beyond, The Center for International Policy: http://www.cipcol.org/). They include members of the government directly linked to the AUC as well as Uribe’s appointment to Colombia’s national intelligence service DAS, Jorge Noguera, which prosecutors have found held ten meetings with paramilitary leaders and passed on to them compiled lists of trade unionists and academics to be assassinated, among other serious charges (Oneworld.net Jan. 28, 2008; People’s Weekly World Feb. 24, 2007). Other scandals have included an alleged assassination plot against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez; the murder of political opponents including FARC spokesman Raul Reyes while negotiating the possibility of a prisoner of war exchange with President Chavez, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, Ecuador’s Interior Minister Gustavo Larrea, and the Colombian Red Cross; the violation of Ecuadorian sovereignty; electoral fraud and bribery; the doctoring of police and judicial records to erase paramilitary cases; and an alleged war crime involving the use of the ‘Red Cross’ emblem during a supposed ‘daring’ and ‘perfect’ military rescue operation against FARC, apparently choreographed by the Colombian government and media (The Guardian Mar. 8, 2007; Petras, 2008; CNN.com Aug. 6, 2008; Leech, 2008).
Annual profits from the drug trade are estimated to be $500 billion; $250 billion (50 percent) is estimated to go to US banks and is not hard to monitor. The US Federal Reserve System registers any deposit over $10,000 (US Department of Treasury, 2000). Colombia’s Central Bank estimates only $76 billion (15 percent) goes to Colombia, less than half of US annual profits from the drug trade and 30 percent of Colombia’s total wealth (www.unam.mx/cronica/1996/a8096/int006.html cited in Richani, 2002, p. 181, n. 54). Conservatively, the total revenue for the commercial export of cocaine for Colombia is estimated to be $3.5 billion (close to $3.75 billion made from oil and more than two and a half times the earnings made from coffee), while North America’s gross revenue from sales to consumers is $11 billion (Livingstone, 2003; Anonymous, 2002).ii

Cocaine must be exported to the United States by air from remote airstrips or by sea from Colombia’s northern and western coasts. It has been reported that right-wing paramilitaries regularly fly Colombian military helicopters to army garrisons for the purpose of collecting cocaine and transporting it to Antioquia for export. In the areas to the south of Bolivar and Catatumbo, the helicopters used come from Colombian military bases (Flounders & Gutierrez, 2003). Jeff Brunner, a DEA supervisor in Colombia, states the AUC controls the coastal region where cocaine leaves the country. According to Brunner, traditional drug lords still exist but they have to work with the AUC if they want to ship their drugs to the US, Europe, or Africa (The Tampa Tribune Jul. 4, 2004). The DEA estimates that Colombia’s net coca cultivation more than tripled, from 50,000 hectares in 1995, to 169,800 hectares in 2001, while cultivation in Peru and Bolivia declined. This increase marked the eighth consecutive year of net growth for the nation’s premier illicit cash crop (The Drug Trade in Colombia: A Threat Assessment, DEA Intelligence Division, 2002). ‘Over the years, [the AUC] have worked to control the coast, knowing that’s where all the dope’s got to leave from. They have their hand in every bit of dope. It has to, at a minimum, be authorized and taxed by them and, at a maximum, controlled by them,’ says Brunner (The Tampa Tribune Jul. 4, 2004). The Tampa Tribune (Jul. 4, 2004) reports that US government court filings indicate the AUC controls the manufacture and transportation of tons of cocaine off the Pacific coast of southwest Colombia to Mexico for distribution in the United States.

5. Conclusion

By any means, standard, or methodology, if the link between the Colombian economic system and the US economy is to be properly understood, then the real and existing importance of cocaine to the political economy of Colombia merits close attention. The US ‘War on Drugs and Terror and Narcoterrorism’ is a product of US imperial policy continuity to eliminate FARC resistance to US domination in Latin America. Colombia is a dynamic case in point where the US global ‘War on Terrorism’ has imposed a ‘narco-capitalism’ which traces back to the United States with impunity. Will the under-examined ‘Crystal Triangle’ in America’s ‘backyard’ become a remedy to the current US-led global economic crisis?

For half a century, the governments of Colombia and the United States have failed to wipe out the FARC insurgency, even with the presence of a right-wing authoritarian regime backed by the world’s sole remaining superpower. Given Colombia’s long history of class struggle over land, this failure to eliminate FARC through counterinsurgency, state-terror, and political repression of Colombian leftists is inevitable.

6. Endnotes

i Ehrenfeld wrote, Narcoterrorism: The Kremlin Connection (1986); Narcoterrorism and the Cuban Connection (1988); and Narcoterrorism (1990). Notably, Ehrenfeld has been a participant in a new series of Western intelligence conferences held in Israel which began in 2003.

ii Colombia’s National Association of Financial Institutions (ANIF) estimated the nation’s total 1999 income from the illegal drug trade to be $3.5 billion. The ANIF estimate was based on an assumption that somewhat less than 10 percent of total earnings from illicit drug sales are repatriated to Colombia each year, and on reported total world retail level sales of Colombian cocaine, heroin and marijuana of $46 billion. The figures are based on a 1999 study. Based on these estimates, Colombian drug earnings would be considerably higher today

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The announcement of the US occupation of more than 7 military bases in Colombia comes at a time when a dictatorship – supported, if tacitly by Washington – in Honduras is consolidating after almost a month and a half has passed since the violent coup d’etat forced Honduran President Manuel Zelaya from power. The increased US military presence in Latin America has been perceived by a majority of nations in this hemisphere as a threat to stability and peace in the region. How does the Obama administration justify increasing the Pentagon’s budget and investing almost $1 billion in its Latin American military operations this year?

Well, maybe by trying to blame Venezuelan President Hugh Chávez of supporting, funding and arming “terrorist” leftist groups in Colombia and “facilitating drug trafficking”. Both allegations have never been founded on solid evidence. In fact, yesterday, President Chávez gave a killer press conference to international media, deconstructing every accusation presented against his government by Colombia and Washington. The latest allegation involved Swedish missile launchers sold to Venezuela in the 1980s that apparently ended up in the hands of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The Uribe government in Colombia, together with Washington, was trying to blame Chávez for selling the weapons to the FARC, therefore justifying its increasing aggression and military presence in the region, to combat “terrorist threats”. “You’re either with us or against us…”

Chávez revealed a document – given to him previously by the Colombian government – dated 1996 after a FARC attack had taken place on Venezuelan soil against Venezuelan armed forces and a quantity of weapons had been stolen. The 1996 document detailed the named Swedish missile launchers as having been taken during that attack, more than 2 years before Chávez won office and became involved in government.

“Dirty, dirty tactics”, said Chávez regarding Uribe’s accusations against him. The Colombian government knows very well that those weapons were in the hands of the FARC well before Chávez became president. So why blame him now for something he has nothing to do with?

Cowardly and pathetic Colombian President Uribe is desperately trying to justify turning his country into the launching pad for Washington’s war on Latin America – a war seeking to regain its domination and control over the region’s vast natural and strategic resources, and to take out any seed of “socialism” remaining in the hemisphere.

But the military bases in Colombia and the coup in Honduras evidence a dangerous and clear intent of Empire to also crush the vibrant people’s movements that have been surfacing all over Latin America during the past decade – revolutions seeking to build new models of social and economic justice.

Latin America is on high alert in response to this revived offensive emerging from Washington. Colombia, isolated in its efforts, is not backing down from opening its land to the vast and barbaric US military power. Where is the outcry inside the United States in response to hundreds of millions – billions – of dollars now directed towards waging war in Latin America? Don’t wait until it’s too late and another nation, like Panama 20 years ago, is bombed and invaded by US forces in order to secure Washington’s long-term control over the region’s strategic resources. Act now to resist and protest US military expansion in Latin America and US aggression against a humble people struggling for justice.

August 6, 2009