Fw: US pushes Colombia to brink of all-out war

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg@tin.it>]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jan2002/colo-j19.shtml

US pushes Colombia to brink of all-out war
By Bill Vann
19 January 2002
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Colombia, for the moment, has avoided the all-out eruption of its
four-decade-old civil war following a last-ditch mediation effort launched
by the United Nations, a group of governments including France, Mexico and
Cuba and the Catholic Church. Bowing to the call for renewed negotiations,
Colombian President Carlos Andres Pastrana announced the postponement of an
ultimatum he had delivered to the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia) guerrilla movement to abandon a 25,000-square-mile "demilitarized
zone" in the south of the country.

More than 23,000 Colombian troops had massed on the border of the zone in
anticipation of a full-scale offensive. Thousands more members of the
right-wing paramilitary death squads of the United Self Defense Forces of
Colombia, or AUC, were also prepared to join the military push, carrying out
massacres against the 100,000 people who live in the towns and villages that
are located in the area under FARC control.

The Colombian military command prepared the offensive without any explicit
orders from the government after Pastrana government broke off peace talks
with the FARC, claiming that the guerrillas had refused to negotiate. FARC
commanders insisted that the government was lying.

According to reports, the guerrillas began withdrawing from the area,
fearing that the military would launch a surprise bombing campaign, just as
it did 18 years ago when the government of Virgilio Barco delivered a
similar ultimatum after breaking off dialogue.

The planned offensive followed a growing military buildup by the government
made possible by the $1.3 billion "Plan Colombia" begun two years ago under
the Clinton administration. This military aid package-combined with much
smaller economic assistance programs that serve as fig leafs for US
intervention-was ostensibly aimed at halting the cultivation of coca and the
production of cocaine in the South American country.

US Green Berets have trained three battalions of Colombian troops and
equipped them with arms and combat helicopters. Just days before Pastrana
delivered his ultimatum, US Ambassador to Bogota Anne Patterson turned over
14 more Black Hawk choppers to the Colombian military at a ceremony held at
the Tolemaida military base. She pledged continued assistance, pointing to
the Bush administration's recent enactment of a $625 million Andean Regional
Initiative, which is further beefing up military aid to Colombia and
neighboring countries.

Pastrana announced at the ceremony that another 25 helicopters that were
sent back to the US would soon be returned, bringing the country's total
fleet to 74, which he said could be used to fight the "narco-guerrillas."

Behind the threats of the Pastrana government lie both the strengthening of
Colombia's military and the turn by the Bush administration toward more
direct intervention in the country.

In the weeks before Pastrana's ultimatum, top administration officials have
held discussions on dispensing with the legal fiction that US aid is
designed solely for narcotics enforcement. When Congress approved Plan
Colombia in 2000, it restricted use of the military aid to aiding the drug
war. Under the plan now under discussion, the US would train another
rapid-reaction battalion for use against the guerrillas, and would use spy
flights and other intelligence-gathering methods to help the Colombian
military prosecute a war against the insurgent groups.

US drug surveillance flights over Colombia and Peru were halted last spring
after a CIA-guided Peruvian combat fighter shot down a civilian aircraft
carrying American missionaries

According to government sources in Washington, one of the principal missions
of the new counterinsurgency forces would be to protect pipelines operated
by US oil companies exploiting petroleum resources in the country.
Significantly, one of the companies with exclusive oil-drilling contracts in
areas where the FARC and ELN now operate is the Texas firm, Harken Energy
Co., whose former director is George W. Bush.

The discussions in Washington have been justified in the name of the
worldwide war on terrorism proclaimed in the wake of the terrorist attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11. In point of
fact, the State Department has classified both the FARC and the smaller ELN
(National Liberation Army) as terrorist groups, but it has given the same
designation to the AUC, the right-wing paramilitary group which functions as
an indispensable partner to the Colombian military in its counterinsurgency
operations.

Much of the US military aid has filtered down to the AUC, which is headed by
Carlos Castaño, a long-time "asset" of the US Central Intelligence Agency.
Even Colombia's Defense Ministry acknowledges that the AUC is principally
responsible for the widespread massacres of civilians throughout the
country. It attributed 1,000 deaths to its operations last year, and blamed
AUC for displacing two million people.

Orders given to the Colombian military to suppress the AUC are routinely
disobeyed, while military units hand over U.S.-supplied arms and ammunition
to the paramilitaries to use in conducting bloodbaths against communities
believed to harbor sympathy for the guerrillas.

U.S. preparations for war in Colombia already extend far beyond the materiel
and training Washington has supplied to the Colombian military. The Pentagon
has virtually completed the construction of a string of military bases in
the region designed to facilitate direct intervention. Air bases have been
set up in El Salvador, Ecuador and the Dutch colonies of Aruba and Curacao.
These facilities would be used to conduct bombardment of the country, as
well as to maintain supply lines.

Meanwhile, US military "advisers" have already been deployed in 34 military
bases scattered throughout Colombia. This does not include the thousands of
Special Forces troops that are rotated in and out of the country under the
cover of training missions and joint military exercises.

Leading the Bush administration's discussions on escalating the US
intervention in Colombia is Otto Reich, appointed earlier this month to the
position of assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere. The
position had been vacant since Bush took office a year ago. The
administration lacked sufficient votes in Congress to win approval for the
nomination of Reich, a right-wing Cuban exile who was intimately involved in
the illegal US "contra" war against Nicaragua under the Reagan
administration in the 1980s.

Bush appointed Reich while Congress was in recess under a statutory
provision allowing such appointments under conditions of emergency. While
some Democratic Congressional leaders protested the action, the party's
leadership allowed the president to carry out this predictable action by
failing to demand Congressional hearings on the appointment. In the face of
the Bush administration's propaganda for a global war on terrorism, none of
them had the courage to expose the administration's own intimate links with
terrorism expressed in the nomination of Reich.

The new assistant secretary of state headed up an Office of Public Diplomacy
in the State Department under the Reagan administration, engaging in what
amounted to a propaganda campaign aimed at the American people to build up
support for the CIA-backed contra mercenaries in Nicaragua.

The office, acting in violation of the Constitution, utilized psychological
warfare methods to boost the image of the contras in the US and to discredit
and intimidate opponents of the US-sponsored war in Nicaragua. An
investigation into the Reagan administration's illegal operations in
Nicaragua forced the closing of the office.

 From there, Reich went to Caracas to serve as US ambassador. He is best
remembered in Venezuela for compelling the government to release Orlando
Bosch, who was jailed in connection with a 1976 terrorist attack which
destroyed a Cuban passenger jet, taking the lives of 73 people.

There is no doubt that Reich's appointment to the State Department signals a
further turn toward US militarism and unilateralism. The opposition of the
European powers as well as the governments of Latin America to US
intervention in the Colombian conflict will be swept aside in the name of
the so-called war on terrorism.

There may not be long to wait for this policy to make itself felt on the
ground in Colombia. In lifting his deadline for the FARC to abandon the
demilitarized zone in southern Colombia, Pastrana issued what amounted to
another ultimatum, demanding that the guerrillas submit concrete proposals
to implement a halt to military operations nationwide by January 20. Should
the Colombian government and its patrons in Washington reject the FARC plan,
the rush to a full-scale war may quickly resume.