Socialist Action /September 2000
Clinton's Military Aid to Colombia:
Prelude to a New 'Vietnam" War?
By GERRY FOLEY
 President Clinton's
$1.3 billion aid to the Colombian government to "fight the drug trade"
was seen by the other Latin American governments for exactly what it is,
an attempt to shore up a ruling class that is beginning to collapse under
the accumulated weight of its crimes.
None of these governments is very presentable itself,
but they are all evidently interested in distancing themselves from an operation
that is discredited from the beginning. Thus, the Latin American presidents
meeting in Brazilia in the beginning of September pointedly rebuffed Clinton's
appeal that they endorse his "war on drugs" in Colombia.
The U.S. government's drug demagogy has considerably
less effect in Latin America than in the United States because it is well
known that imperialist economics have forced small farmers to cultivate
coca and other sources of narcotics as their only means of surviving.
In an April report on the situation in Colombia,
the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights noted:
"The illegal agricultural sector is largely
a colonization-driven frontier survival economy. The majority of opium
poppy and coca is cultivated at small and medium-sized farms by poor peasant
families for whom the illicit crops constitute the only available means
of survival. During the eighties and nineties rural conditions continuously
worsened resulting in a mix of economic and conflict related developments.
"Two key causes were the diminishing prices
of agricultural products on the international markets, and a counter-agrarian-reform
agenda. The new concentration of land was the result of a violent process
in which many farmers and families were forced off their land by paramilitary
groups.
"In the absence of viable economic alternatives
and fleeing from war, hundreds of thousands took refuge in illicit agriculture
production, and a new colonization process was set into motion."
Obviously, the peasant guerrilla movements have
their base in the more remote areas, where the peasants have been driven
back on growing coca and similar crops. That provides the cover for counterinsurgency
operations in the name of fighting the drug trade.
On Sept. 2, The New York Times reported that a
helicopter gunship of the type that formed the backbone of the U.S. counterinsurgency
campaign in Vietnam crashed in the Colombian jungle. It had been engaged
in an operation against peasant guerrillas. Clinton's aid package includes
60 such gunships.
It is no wonder that not only Latin American bourgeois
politicians but U.S. ones as well are talking about Washington's involvement
in Colombia as the road to a new Vietnam.
Moreover, the nature of the Colombian regime is
well known in Latin America. For 50 years anyone who has annoyed the reactionary
landowners and neocolonial business class has simply been murdered. The
pattern was established by the killing of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a popular
reformer, in 1948.
Gaitan's assassination touched off a mass uprising
that was a key episode in the political education of Fidel Castro, who was
in Bogota at the time for a student conference. This incident and the developments
following it were a political watershed for all of Latin America.
Every left candidate that has tried to challenge
the established political system in Colombia has been assassinated. For
many years, power was simply alternated by a pact between the two big bourgeois
parties. The actual vote was only a formality. The Colombian ruling class
was a somewhat overzealous imitator of the U.S. two-party system.
Because of the rapaciousness and brutality of the
big landowners, peasantry insurgency has been endemic for many years. In
their attempt to repress, the ranchers and their government have resorted
to outright gangsterism, forming and maintaining death squads.
Furthermore, the CIA has been involved up to its
neck in this gangsterism. Human Rights Watch has documented the CIA's role
in setting up the intelligence networks on which the Colombian government's
terror campaigns have been based.
The report of the UN High Commission cites the
example of a death squad incursion into the village of Mipiripan in July
1997, when the rightist paramilitaries hacked 25 people to pieces in the
local slaughterhouse. Such atrocities have been and continue to be commonplace.
This pattern of terror has been matched by a general
brutalization of the society. For example, an average of six children a
day are murdered in Colombia, many by the police, who regard stray kids
as nothing more than vermin. Per capita, more children are disposed of in
this way in Colombia than in Brazil, where the slaughter of street children
has become an international scandal.
Even a president as noted for his slickness as
Clinton bit off more than he could chew when he tried to present his "aid"
package to the Colombian rulers as a defense of human values.
Socialist Action /September 2000 |