The U.S. in Latin America
Addicted to military intervention
By
Deirdre Griswold
Ever since the Cuban Revolution broke the hold of U.S.
corporations on that island, the U.S. government has been
alternately threatening and promising the countries of Latin
America.
The job of the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency and
the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been to tell the
countries south of the border: "Don't even think of trying to
liberate yourselves from Yankee domination." The U.S. Southern
Command has supervised U.S. military interventions in the
Dominican Republic, Panama, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala
and Grenada. The Pentagon has trained contras and military
officers from many other right-wing dictatorships.
Congress recently voted to close the notorious School of the
Americas in Fort Benning, Ga., after thousands of protesters
had been arrested in an ongoing campaign against the notorious
"school of the assassins." The school was used to train
officers for the military in Latin America, and its graduates
have included some of the worst murderers and torturers.
The CIA was behind bloody military dictatorships that ruled
for years in an area stretching from Central America to the six
countries of the Southern Cone--Chile, Bolivia, Brazil,
Uruguay, Paraguay and Argen tina. In Operation Condor, these
six regimes collaborated to murder and torture tens of
thousands of leftists and their families.
An article in the Aug. 11 New York Times tells of the
release of once-secret documents by Paraguay, where Gen.
Alfredo Stroessner ran a fascist military dictatorship from
1954 until he was overthrown in 1989. They included a letter
from former FBI Director Clarence M. Kelley to Pastor Coronel,
former head of the Department of Investigations, who is now
serving a 25-year sentence for torture.
Kelley had wished the Paraguayan torturer "a truly joyous
Christmas and a New Year filled with all the good things you so
richly deserve."
Role of "soft cop"
The job of the State Department and the Commerce Department,
however, has been to paint a rosy picture of how U.S.
investment coupled with grants and loans would help overcome
poverty and bring development--while imposing onerous economic
"adjustments." President John F. Kennedy made the first big
push for this after the Cuban Revolution in his Alliance for
Progress.
The problem, however, is that years of foreign domination
and the extraction of the region's wealth by transnational
corporations and banks, most of them based in the U.S., have
created the poverty.
The prescriptions of U.S. imperialism--whether for more
investment and loans or demands that the countries involved
sell off their national properties to foreign buyers--may pump
in money in the short term, but over the long term they wind up
sucking out even more of what the workers and farmers
produce.
Former CIA officer Philip Agee, who left the agency and
exposed its true nature, wrote in his book "Inside the Company"
that while the U.S., through the Alliance for Progress, was
channeling $5 billion into Latin America, it was taking out $20
billion in profits and interest.
Even as U.S. millionaires have become billionaires, and
money has flowed into Wall Street like an Amazon-sized river,
the people of Latin America have become poorer. Now the
recession ushered in by currency crises a year ago has bloomed
into a full-blown depression in much of the region, and
double-digit unemployment is becoming the rule.
It is this squeezing dry of the millions of workers, farmers
and the middle class that is now creating a new political
crisis in much of Latin America. Massive and militant strikes
have become the order of the day in most countries--especially
in the public sector, as budgets for social services are cut
back and jobs eliminated.
Colombia and Venezuela
Most in the news these days is Colombia, where the
government of President Andres Pastrana has relinquished
control over an area the size of Switzerland to the Marxist-led
revolutionary armed forces of the FARC.
The State Department and CIA are also closely watching
neighboring Venezuela. A former military officer, Hugo Chavez,
who tried in 1992 to overthrow the previous government, was
recently elected president there by an overwhelming popular
vote.
A column by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in
the Aug. 10 New York Times entitled "Colombia's Struggles and
How We Can Help" presented the "soft cop" side of Washington's
two-pronged effort to defeat the revolutionary forces in that
country. It promised help to "build prosperity" and seemed to
give support to Pastrana's efforts to negotiate a settlement
with the guerrillas.
However, Albright described a U.S. plane that recently
crashed there, killing five U.S. and two Colombian military
personnel, as on a "counter-narcotics mission" that "put the
spotlight on our stake in South America's most troubled
country."
Albright didn't even mention the scandal rocking the U.S.
Embassy in Bogota, which is of course under her jurisdiction.
The colonel in charge of all U.S. military operations in
Colombia, including what Albright refers to as
"counter-narcotics," has just left for an undisclosed location
after his wife was charged in a U.S. court with mailing
packages of cocaine, worth $225,000, directly from the embassy
to addresses in the United States.
Albright did admit, however, that Colombia's right-wing
paramilitary militias "regularly abuse human rights" and "use
the drug trade to finance their operations." But she tried to
paint the left-wing guerrillas with the same brush and the U.S.
as a clean savior.
That is a lie.
Colombian president:
`FARC are not drug traffickers'
The characterization of the FARC as "narco-terrorists" by
Albright, by U.S. "drug czar" Gen. Barry McCaffrey, and by
other government officials has been contradicted by none other
than Colombian President Pastrana himself.
In an interview July 29 with the Argentine newspaper Clarin,
Pastrana said, "There is no evidence at the moment that the
FARC are drug traffickers." The Colombian president, who has
been meeting with the FARC, said, "I would never talk with the
drug traffickers."
In fact, the FARC is fighting to transform the Colombian
economy from one tied to supplying the U.S. market with
whatever it demands--and drugs are a significant part of the
U.S. economy--to one controlled by the Colombian people and
organized to fulfill their needs.
The FARC comes from a tradition of socialist revolutionaries
similar to those in China and Cuba, who proved to be the only
social force capable of eradicating drug trafficking and
organized crime.
This is because their goal, in a struggle that has lasted 35
years, is to erect a society based not on private profits but
on social ownership and planning of the economy. Nobody whose
goal is the quick fix of drug profits would spend their whole
lives in the arduous task of building a revolutionary
movement.
The Colombian cartels that make profits off the cocaine
trade, just like the anti-Castro Cuban gangsters and casino
owners who fled to Miami after that revolution, are deadly
enemies of the Marxist-led FARC--and so are the even bigger
U.S. drug criminals.
Rebuffs to U.S. plans for intervention
Gen. Charles Wilhelm, Commander in Chief of the U.S.
Southern Command, has told U.S. legislators that the Pentagon
shouldn't pull its troops out of Panama because then that
country wouldn't be able to defend itself from Colombian rebels
and drug traffickers.
In an angry reply on June 23, Panamanian Foreign Minister
Jorge Ritter said, "These statements are inadmissible....
Panama is not the target of aggression by any foreign power or
group."
He added that the mission of U.S. troops in the Canal Zone
"has not been to protect the waterway, nor to monitor our
borders, nor even less to safeguard Panama ... they have been
historically linked to the implementation of U.S. policy in the
region."
General McCaffrey has been especially aggressive in pushing
the "war on drugs." He rushed to Bogota at the beginning of
August, after the U.S. plane crash, and then made a public
demand that the U.S. government spend an added $1 billion this
year so Colombia can buy sophisticated helicopters and
communications equipment from U.S. arms companies--to "fight
drug traffickers."
But all this is so obviously an excuse for U.S. military
intervention in the region that it has largely backfired.
The second week in August, Undersecretary of State for
Political Affairs Thomas Pickering and his assistant Peter
Romero visited Colombia and Venezuela trying to push
McCaffrey's proposal. "It was our very strong feeling, after
about six hours of talks with the Colombians ... that they feel
that this is a Colombian problem that needs to be, in the final
analysis, solved by the Colombians themselves," said Romero on
Aug. 16. He added that the U.S. had no plans to send troops to
Colombia.
Former Green Beret
tells it like it is
But the plans to increase training and military aid are
going ahead. Here's what a former Green Beret, Stan Goff, said
about the real role of these trainers in a column in the
Raleigh News-Observer on July 29:
"When I was training Colombian Special Forces in Tolemaida
in 1992, my team was there allegedly to aid the
counter-narcotics effort. Narcotics were the cover story for a
similar trip to Peru in 1991. In both cases we were giving
military forces training in infantry counter-insurgency
doctrine.
"We and the host-nation commanders knew perfectly well that
narcotics was a flimsy alibi. They needed help. They had lost
the confidence of the population through years of abuse. And
they were suffering setbacks in the field against
guerrillas."
Meanwhile, Pastrana himself is undoubtedly feeling the heat
from the paramilitaries and elements in the Colombian military
close to them. Perhaps as a warning to the president, Jaime
Garzon, a popular radio comedian who satirized the rich and
powerful and had helped negotiate the release of hostages by
the National Liberation Army (ELN), a second guerrilla group,
was gunned down in Bogota in broad daylight on Aug. 13. He had
received death threats from the leader of the right-wing
militias, Carlos Castano.
At a massive funeral rally for him, a large banner read
"Fascism will not happen," reported the Washington Post of Aug.
15.
Albright's column in the Times was meant to reassure
Pastrana and the world that the U.S. is not behind the
fascists--as it has been so many times in the past in Latin
America. But meanwhile new bases have been built in Ecuador and
Peru along the border with Colombia, and U.S. Special Forces
are there training elite units.
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