Decades Later, Americas Meddling in Colombia is Still Costing Lives
From the drug war to Plan Colombia to support for right-wing paramilitary
groups, decades of US interference in Colombia has caused so much
instability that to this day, the country is still reeling from it.
by Alan Macleod
August 28th, 2020
By Alan Macleod
On a warm Tuesday morning earlier this month in Llano Verde, an eastern
suburb of the city of Cali, five Afro-Colombian children decided to leave
their homes to take advantage of the fine weather to spend some time
outside. They would never return. Only a few hours later, they were found
dead; their bodies burned, cut to pieces with machetes and riddled with
bullets, dumped in public for all to see.
The residents of Llano Verde are no strangers to violence; the majority of
them are refugees, displaced from the fighting in Colombias civil war. The
local press reported that the boys, Luis Fernando Montaño, Josmar Jean Paul
Cruz Perlaza, Álvaro Jose Caicedo Silva, Jair Andrés Cortes Castro, and
Leider Cárdenas Hurtado, were members of the vibrant local art scene and had
gone to fly kites such an innocent activity in a land of the guilty.
A violent history
The incident has shocked the people of Cali, but not surprised them. Last
week alone there were five massacres across the country. Cali is not even
the most recent one; on Tuesday, the bodies of three young men were found on
a roadside in Ocaña, a city near the Venezuelan border. That was the
countrys 46th massacre in 2020 to date, according to local human rights
group Indepez, who notes that 185 people have been killed this year more
than one person per day.
Every massacre is a message, said Manuel Rozental, a physician and
longtime activist living in Cauca, in the countrys southwest. Young,
indigenous, Afro-Colombians are being murdered en masse in different regions
of the country
The massacres are methodic, systematic. It is a job being
done as planned, he told MintPress.
James Jordan, the National Co-Coordinator of the Alliance for Global
Justice, appeared to agree, stating that:
We have been watching with alarm as enemies of peace in Colombia have
continued to escalate threats and assaults against human rights defenders,
social movement leaders, and ex-insurgents participating in the peace
process. Also targeted have been their family members, including, in some
cases, children and even infants. As always, the most affected by political
violence are rural farming, indigenous, and Afro-Colombian communities.
The government, led by President Ivan Duque, blamed leftist rebel groups for
the killings, particularly the FARC. The majority of the latest massacres
have indeed occurred in rural areas controlled by the rebels until the
historic 2016 peace accords, where the FARC agreed to demobilize and enter
the political arena instead. Yet the experts MintPress spoke to were
skeptical of Duques claims. Who in Colombia, after the FARC dismantled has
the capacity to locate, threaten and murder social leaders and now proceed
with massacres with such precision? The answer is obvious, there has to be
military intelligence involved, said Rozental. Certainly, throughout
Colombias recent history, the majority of atrocities have been carried out
by government-linked paramilitaries, who have enjoyed virtually free rein to
impose their will on the country.
Cali murders
Jorge Ivan Ospina, the Mayor of Cali, visits the crime scene where the
bodies of five young men were found. Photo | Twitter via Jorge Ivan Ospina
Duque visited Cali on Saturday, and ordered national police chief General
Oscar Atehortua to take charge of the investigation, and instructed his
forces to be relentless in their pursuit of justice, aggressive language
which worried many he was trying to calm. At the same time, he has attempted
to downplay the recent upsurge in violence, describing the massacres as
merely collective homicides. Today, the government announced it had
arrested two suspects, although their affiliations, let alone their guilt,
are still unclear at this point.
Professor Mario A. Murillo of Hofstra University, author of Colombia and
the United States: War, Terrorism and Destabilization, was profoundly
agnostic about the perpetrators of the violence, but believes the broader
situation stems from failures in government. The recent wave of massacres
hitting predominantly rural communities in Colombia, at first glance,
appears to be part of a random lawlessness which authorities are
deliberately finding difficulty in attributing responsibility to, but is
actually the direct result of the failures of the current government to
fully implement the 2016 peace agreement signed with FARC rebels by the
previous administration, he said.
The bottom line is if President Duque had not taken the lead from the
right-wing base of his Democratic Center Party in dismantling every
important provision of the peace accord from land reform to justice for
the victims of the decades-long war, from sustainable rural development, to
guarantees for social movements and demobilized guerillas in a post-conflict
Colombia the country would not be reliving this kind of terror,
reminiscent of the horrors of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Dont vote for Petro
Ivan Duque came to power in 2018 in a hotly contested and highly
questionable election that pitted him against former leftist guerilla
Gustavo Petro. This was the first time that the left appeared to have a shot
at power since the assassination of President Jorge Gaitan in 1948, an event
that sparked decades of civil war. Right-wing paramilitary death squads
sprung into action, announcing generalized death threats against those who
attempted to vote for Petro. Petro himself narrowly survived an
assassination attempt in the run-up to the election. Some of his supporters
were less lucky. American human rights lawyer Daniel Kovalik, an election
observer, said he was mistaken for a voter and offered money to vote for
Duque. There were over 1,000 official electoral fraud complaints. Jordan
explained to MintPress his experiences with the questionable vote
During the Summer of 2018, we took an election observation team to Colombia.
That election season was, historically, the first in which former insurgents
from the FARC participated as a legal political party after laying down
arms. It was also marked by organized threats and assaults by paramilitary
actors against left and center-left campaigns, and against various popular
movements. And it was marked by massive electoral fraud and irregularities,
some of which our teams witnessed directly.
Plan Colombia
Duque is the protege of the strongly conservative president Alvaro Uribe,
who ruled the country between 2002 and 2010. Uribe worked closely with the
United States government to implement the Bush administrations Plan
Colombia, a massive push to militarize the drug war, leading to huge death
and destruction in the nations countryside and resulting in widespread
social dislocation and upheaval. However, many observers saw Washingtons
move as a veiled attempt to ply a favored government with weapons so they
could defeat Colombias leftist rebels once and for all. Of note is that
Uribe himself was named as an important player in the narco-trafficking
trade in a 1991 U.S. government document.
Largely unknown outside the country, Colombias civil war, which began in
1964 and has never fully stopped, has caused massive social upheaval,
including some 7.4 million currently displaced people, according to the
United Nations. By comparison, the conflict in Syria generated 6.2 million
displacements. Afro-Colombians were particularly hard hit.
Uribe also oversaw a years-long series of extrajudicial murders and
massacres that resulted in over 10,000 deaths. Dubbed the False Positives
Scandal, government forces would murder anyone they wished, later claiming
their victims were members of the FARC. This allowed Uribe to impose his
rule on the country, intimidating opponents into silence. Colombia became,
according to Amnesty International, the most dangerous place in the world
to be a trade unionist, with more unionist murders occurring inside the
country than in all others combined.
Even today, right-wing paramilitaries linked to the government have been
using the COVID-19 lockdown to go after activists, with more than 100
murdered in the first half of 2020 alone. Our enemies are still killing us
and its not difficult for them during the pandemic because we are all at
home, complying with the mandatory quarantine which means nobody can move,
one Afro-Colombian activist wrote for Amnesty. Being at home 24 hours a day
is a death sentence because the gunmen know where to find us.
Rozental was of the opinion that drugs, violence and the state were all
fundamentally intertwined in Colombia, telling MintPress,
The relationship with drug trafficking and cartels
no-one can ignore or deny
the evidence and the knowledge of the fact that the Colombian state, at the
highest level, the Armed Forces, the judicial system and the congress are
all involved in drug trafficking mafias and the business of drug
trafficking. The personification of this is Alvaro Uribe.
Yet this is largely ignored in the West, with corporate media often
presenting the country as an emerging democracy, and Uribe as a beloved
statesman, with some even describing him as the savior of a nation and a
beacon of hope for the world.
Uribes past may have finally caught up to him, however, as the former
president was charged and placed under house arrest earlier this month for
allegedly attempting to bribe a witness in a case involving members of a
paramilitary group. He also stands accused of being a founding member of a
right-wing death squad. He faces up to eight years in prison if convicted.
Could it be the man who was once considered untouchable is about to feel the
wrath of the state he helped build?
Murillo believed that there could be a connection between his arrest and the
explosion of violence in the past few weeks, saying:
It is most likely not a coincidence that this current wave of massacres,
which were part of daily life in Colombia when Duques benefactor, former
President Alvaro Uribe, took the reigns of power in 2002, are occurring just
as Uribe sits through house arrest, facing justice for his involvement in
witness tampering and paramilitary activity. Are they designed as a
distraction? Or worse yet, retribution for Uribes detention? Unfortunately,
in Colombia, we will most likely never get to the bottom of it.
Who benefits?
So who is responsible for the upsurge of massacres? Is it the FARC, as the
government alleges? Or were right-wing paramilitaries to blame? Or perhaps
one of the myriads of narco-trafficking groups operating in the region? Or a
combination of many factors? If history is any judge, we will probably never
get a definitive answer. Colombia is a country of so much beauty and so
little justice.
A man walks his dog next to a mural depicting former President Alvaro Uribe,
in Bogota, Colombia. Fernando Vergara | AP
For Rozental, even asking that question can be unhelpful. Instead, he says,
we must simply recognize who the beneficiaries are. Then it becomes easier
to understand. The intention is to consolidate an articulation between
transnational corporate financial and extractive interests with drug
trafficking mafias, he said, noting that marijuana grown in his home
department of Cauca and bought for $3-$5 is sold in the U.S. for $5,000.
Cocaine production is a similar story, with the area under coca cultivation
more than tripling between 2013 and 2018, according to the U.N.
There is a massive transfer of wealth flowing north with drug trafficking,
and the entire violent mafia-type organizations that produce and transform,
open spaces for extractive transnational interests, for geo-political
initiatives and for the displacement and destruction of social movements and
organizations that generate alternatives from below. One needs a different
mindset to look at what is happening here. The massacres are means to ends.
Victims call upon the government for help, which provides the pretext for
militarization, which has in every case led to more drug trafficking and
more violence, Rozental told MintPress.
The American connection
For Jordan, the actions of the United States government have also played a
part in the surge in violence, telling us that the Trump administration has
leaned on Duque to abandon his governments commitment to rural communities
and its crop substitution policy, which allowed poor farmers the opportunity
to make an honest living, rather than growing illicit crops. Instead, as
they did during Plan Colombia, the U.S. government has favored empowering
the military to intervene and to eradicate crops around the country, efforts
that have strengthened their hand and emboldened paramilitaries to act like
all rural farmers are mortal enemies engaged in criminal activity. Jordan
also alleges that Trump has eagerly pushed Colombia to abandon its truth
and reconciliation program and the rehabilitation of former guerilla
fighters back into polite society. To understand the situation fully, he
said, we have to look beyond Colombia, toward the US and NATO Empire.
Colombia, of course, has for nearly 200 years been considered by those in
Washington to be Americas backyard, with the nation proving to be among
the U.S.s most loyal allies in the hemisphere. Even during the wave of
left-wing governments that came to power in Latin America during the 2000s
and 2010s, Colombia held firm, being a vital American foothold on the
continent, from which it continued to destabilize neighboring states like
Venezuela.
The U.S. has always been deeply involved in the drug trade. Investigative
journalist Gary Webb detailed how, during the 1980s, the CIA helped flood
Americas black communities with crack cocaine, allowing the far-right
Nicaraguan Contra death squads to profit from the practice, aiding them in
their fight to overthrow the leftist Sandinistas. Webb was found with two
bullets in his head in 2004. Officials ruled it a suicide, although some
remain skeptical. To this day, Webb is still despised in elite journalist
circles; corporate media outlets having worked overtime to contain the story
and stop his reporting going mainstream. Today, some of the Iran-Contra
squad is back in the White House, with Elliott Abrams appointed special
advisor to Trump on Venezuela and Iran. In 1991 Abrams pleaded guilty to
lying to congress about how, behind the scenes, his associates were selling
arms to Iran to fund their regime change project in Nicaragua.
Ultimately, as long as Americans continue to pay top dollar for illicit
drugs, Colombians will continue to pay in blood. The identities of most of
the countrys killers remains a mystery, but the violent context in which
the massacres are happening is not.
Feature photo | Jorge Ivan Ospina, the Mayor