[News] The Wages of Plan Colombia Have Been Death

[Anti-Imperialist News]

*http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/The-Wages-of-Plan-Colombia-Have-Been-Death-20160203-0009.html* 



  The Wages of Plan Colombia Have Been Death

February 3, 2016  By Daniel Kovalik

By: Daniel Kovalik

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Plan Colombia’s 15th anniversary will be celebrated in Washington 
Thursday. But the legacy of the plan is marked by massacres, mass 
graves, and death squads.

According to Colombia's Victims Unit 
<http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/7-Million-Victims-of-Colombias-Conflict-20141118-0008.html>, the 
number of victims of Colombia's civil war has surpassed 7 million. This 
number includes those who have been killed, disappeared or displaced 
since 1956. For a country of under 50 million citizens, these numbers 
are staggering, and certainly newsworthy, but apparently not for the 
mainstream media.

Of course, the violence and human rights abuses in Colombia have 
constituted inconvenient truths for the Western media as the U.S. has 
been a major sponsor of the violence and abuses in that country.

Indeed, a notable fact in the Colombia Victims Unit report is that "that 
the majority of victimization occurred after 2000, peaking in 2002 at 
744,799 victims." It is not coincidental that "Plan Colombia," or "Plan 
Washington" as many Colombians have called it, was inaugurated by 
President Bill Clinton in 2000, thus escalating the conflict to new 
heights and new levels of barbarity. Plan Colombia is a plan pursuant to 
which the U.S. has given Colombia billions in mostly military and police 
assistance.

As Amnesty International has explained 
<http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/countries/americas/colombia/us-policy-in-colombia>, 
these monies have only fueled the human rights crisis in Colombia:

Amnesty International USA has been calling for a complete cut off of US 
military aid to Colombia for over a decade due to the continued 
collaboration between the Colombian Armed Forces and their paramilitary 
allies as well the failure of the Colombian government to improve human 
rights conditions.

Colombia has been one of the largest recipients of US military aid for 
well over a decade and the largest in the western hemisphere. . . . Yet 
torture, massacres, "disappearances" and killings of non-combatants are 
widespread and collusion between the armed forces and paramilitary 
groups continues to this day. . . .

"Plan Colombia" -- the name for the US aid package since 2000, was 
created as a strategy to combat drugs and contribute to peace, mainly 
through military means....

Despite overwhelming evidence of continued failure to protect human 
rights the State Department has continued to certify Colombia as fit to 
receive aid. The US has continued a policy of throwing "fuel on the 
fire" of already widespread human rights violations, collusion with 
illegal paramilitary groups and near total impunity.

Furthermore, after 10 years and over $8 billion dollars of U.S. 
assistance to Colombia, U.S. policy has failed to reduce availability or 
use of cocaine in the US, and Colombia's human rights record remains 
deeply troubling. Despite this, the State Department continues to 
certify military aid to Colombia, even after reviewing the country's 
human rights record.

However, what Amnesty International did not explain are two salient facts.

First, the human rights group does not mention that Plan Colombia was 
initiated in the midst of peace talks between the Colombian government 
and FARC guerillas, and actually played a key role in derailing these 
talks 
<http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Peace-Colombias-Conflict-Intervention/dp/097203840X>, 
and with them the prospects for peace – prospects which have only been 
revived recently.

Second, Amnesty International does not mention that the paramilitaries 
which continue to collaborate with the U.S.-backed military in Colombia 
were actually a creation of the U.S. Thus, these paramilitaries were the 
brainchild of the Kennedy Administration back in 1962  -  that is, two 
years before the FARC guerillas were even constituted.

As Noam Chomsky has mentioned a number of times 
<http://www.bostonreview.net/noam-chomsky-responsibility-of-intellectuals-redux>, 
Kennedy commenced the U.S.’s counterinsurgency program, of which 
paramilitaries were a key component, in order to combat the scourge of 
Liberation Theology unleashed by Vatican II. And indeed, as Chomsky has 
also noted, the U.S. School of the Americas has bragged about how it 
helped “destroy liberation theology,” which emphasizes the “preferential 
treatment of the poor.”

Colombia has been ground zero for this plan which has targeted, among 
others, Catholic clergy for assassination. Accordingly, as documented by 
the Episcopal Conference of Colombia, over 80 Catholic clergy have been 
murdered in Colombia since 1984 
<http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/global-issues/latin-america-caribbean/colombia/upload/translation-colombian-bishops-reject-priest-s-murder.pdf> 
-- including 79 priests and 2 bishops -- for the crime of advocating on 
behalf of the poor.

One brave Colombian Liberation Priest, Father Javier Giraldo sent a 
letter <http://www.javiergiraldo.org/spip.php?article212> in September 
of 2011 to the U.S. Ambassador to Colombia, P. Michael McKinley, 
imploring him to prevail upon President Barack Obama to reconsider his 
decision to release millions of dollars in military aid to Colombia in 
light its abysmal human rights record.

In this letter, Father Giraldo informed the Ambassador that Colombian 
military’s directive known as EJC 3-10 – a directive based upon General 
Yarborough’s 1962 recommendation to organize paramilitary groups – is 
still very much in effect today in the form of paramilitary groups which 
both the U.S. and Colombian governments attempt to dismiss as mere 
criminal bands known as “BACRIM.”

According to Father Giraldo, these neo-paramilitary groups, as before, 
continue to work “in close harmony with the Army and Police” to carry 
out crimes against humanity, including forced displacement, with the 
number of internally displaced people in Colombia now at over 6 million 
<http://www.coha.org/colombias-invisible-crisis-internally-displaced-persons/>; 
extra-judicial killings which have resulted in the proliferation of mass 
graves throughout Colombia; and “the systematic crime of forced 
disappearances, which according to national and international agencies 
now affects more than 50,000 families.”

And, he also places the responsibility for these continued abuses firmly 
at the feet of the U.S. Thus, Father Giraldo informs the U.S. ambassador 
that “[t]he current commanders take part in the same immunity, and 
impunity and the assistance from your government only reinforces their 
criminal activity.”

As Father Giraldo explains, the U.S.’s military/paramilitary policy is 
part and parcel of an unjust economic policy which allows for the 
unconstrained penetration of Colombia by multinational corporations at 
the expense of the Colombian people. He states:

The permits issued for mining exploitation to numerous transnational 
businesses have activated paramilitaries and armed conflict 
tremendously. They are leaving huge populations of poor people without 
any land or resources. The destruction of the environment and the 
destruction of indigenous, campesino and Afro-Colombian communities by 
these projects are leading to every kind of resistance. This means that 
the security of these companies and of their destructive projects is 
only effective with the protection of enormous contingents of 
paramilitaries secretly co-opted by the armed forces and by the 
government security agencies, which do not hesitate to murder the 
leaders of the resistance.

Father Giraldo further describes:

“The permanent genocide that is being carried out in Buenaventura, where 
the neighborhoods and the Community Councils around the port are being 
invaded by paramilitaries supported or tolerated by the armed forces.   
They cut people in pieces with horrifying cruelty throwing the body 
parts in to the sea, if any of them dare to resist the megaproject for 
the new port. This included the expulsion of people living in the 
poorest areas and it includes the expropriation of the plots of garbage 
dumps where these people, in the midst of their misery, have over 
decades tried to survive.

Not surprisingly, Father Giraldo’s prophetic voice fell on deaf ears, 
and Obama proceeded with the release of the military aid to Colombia. 
And, it is the deathly silence over the horrifying human rights 
situation in Colombia which allows the U.S. to continue its destructive 
military/economic policy in that country.

/Daniel Kovalik is labor and human rights lawyer. He teaches 
International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law./

-- 
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