FROM A FORMER GREEN BERET
Is Colombia the next Vietnam?
By Stan Goff
On my 19th birthday, I departed McChord Air Force Base for
Vietnam.
I was told I was going to fight for democracy there. The
people back home were being told the same thing.
I found the truth was substantially different.
On the ground, we waged war not for democracy, but against
the entire Vietnamese people. It cost billions of dollars and
58,000 American lives--as well as over 3,000,000 lives among
the people of Southeast Asia--before we discovered that we had
been manipulated by a vast military-industrial complex, a
compliant press, and cynical political demagogues.
In 1996, I retired from 3rd Special Forces after having
participated in my last massive deception of the people of the
United States--again allegedly to protect democracy--in
Haiti.
They are doing it again. The people of the United States are
being led down the garden path in Colombia.
Under cover of the "fight against communism," we surrendered
trillions of dollars from our national treasury to support
criminals: Jonas Savimbi in Angola, Roberto D'Aubuisson in El
Salvador, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia,
Romeo Lucas Garcia in Guatemala, Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam,
François Duvalier in Haiti and so forth.
Our treasury also supported drug traffickers. The Central
Intelligence Agency trained, equipped and financed the opium
empires of the Golden Triangle, the narcotics-financed Chinese
Nationalists, the Corsican Mafia, the Sicilian Mafia, the U.S.
Mafia, Afghani-Pakistani heroin traders, the drug kings of the
bloodthirsty Guatemalan G-2, key members of Mexico's
Guadalajara Cartel, the cocaine-financed Contras of Nicaragua,
drug traffickers with the Peruvian National Intelligence
Service (SIN), the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army--a Balkan
criminal network responsible for over 20 percent of Europe's
heroin imports--and the Cali drug cartel in Colombia.
These activities were undertaken in every case to protect
capitalist profits. They still are.
The profound irony--or the profound deception--is that the
justification for U.S. military escalation in Colombia is a war
on drugs.
The House of Representatives has already approved a
$1.7-billion "aid package" for Colombia. The lion's share of
that "aid" is for the Colombian military.
To sell this "aid" to the people here, we are being told
that the U.S. Special Forces already training Colombia's armed
forces are there to "assist in the counter-narcotics
effort."
I was on one of those teams in Colombia in 1992, with the
same story. It was a lie then, and it is a lie now.
We said one thing, did another
We were explicitly told that due to political sensitivities,
any discussion of the mission to Colombia--like all missions
going down from 7th Special Forces--was to be represented as
part of the counter-narcotics effort. This was not a directive
to clarify our mission, but to clarify how we were to represent
the mission.
What we conducted was counter-insurgency training.
We were based at Tolemaida, the Peruvian Special Forces
base. The troops we trained not only did not attempt to hide
their mission--to prosecute the war against Marxist
guerrillas--they were deployed to conduct operations on the
weekend breaks.
The Colombian Army was losing ground. Their officers were
corrupt; many involved themselves in drug traffic. There was
racism in the ranks directed at Indigenous and Afro-Colombian
troops.
Their long-standing record of abuses against civilians had
earned fear and hatred from the people. Many of the
officers--while physically tough and full of bravado--were
incompetent planners and uninspiring leaders.
Anyone who knows the history of Vietnam will remember that a
similar situation existed in South Vietnam after the United
States took the role of colonial overseer. Ngo Dinh Diem,
hand-picked by the United States, exercised tenuous control
over a hodge-podge of corrupt military factions, each
representing different interests.
President Andres Pastrana of Colombia finds himself in much
the same situation today.
Our job was to begin teaching the fundamentals of night
patrolling and the integration of infantry operations with
heliborne infiltration and extraction. A previous team of
specially trained American chopper pilots had just finished
teaching their Air Force rotor-wing pilots how to operate at
night.
The subject of every tactical discussion with Colombian
planners was how to fight guerrillas, not drugs.
The U. S. military is involving itself in a civil war.
People who remember Vietnam should find this very familiar.
It began with a decision by the president, the national
security advisor, and the secretary of defense not to "cede"
Vietnam. The interests that drove that decision were manifold.
McCarthyism's impact gave the decision momentum of its own. The
strategic decision was actually about filling post-World War II
colonial vacuums with American influence, and with protecting
current and future investments in Asia.
In Colombia, the U.S. interest is regional as well. Colombia
sits in an oil- and mineral-rich region that includes
Venezuela, Brazil and Ecuador, where populist and
anti-imperialist movements are gaining strength. The United
States sees Colombia as the front line against this current,
and as a necessary foothold in the region.
John F. Kennedy won an uncomfortably close presidential
election against Richard Nixon in 1960. Nixon relentlessly
baited Kennedy for being "soft on communism." Now the fear is
to be labeled "soft on drugs."
Washington propped up a doddering regime against a popular
insurgency in Vietnam. Pastrana's administration is certainly
being ripped apart by at least as many competing factions as
Diem's.
Will Pastrana go the way of Diem?
Colombians perceive Pastrana as Washington's man. But he is
under pressure to make a deal with the guerrillas to end the
civil war. The guerrillas' demands for land reform, crop
subsidies, social services and commodity price indexation are
considered off-limits by the U.S. administration.
Recent attacks against Pastrana by the U.S. capitalist
press--usually a precursor to the U.S. foreign policy
establishment dumping a client--should give the Colombian
president pause. He should think of Diem, dead in the back of
an armored personnel carrier after a coup directed by the U.S.
government.
The Clinton administration is now requesting that the
ceiling for U.S. military advisors in Colombia be raised from
100 to 170. That's just the way it happened in Vietnam.
In Pastrana's July counter-offensive last year, U.S.
military pilots were flying active, direct-support tactical
reconnaissance missions. One aircraft was lost, and the
Department of Defense has been mute about the
circumstances.
The Colombian military is intimately linked to networks of
right-wing paramilitaries--death squads--that receive a large
portion of their funding, apart from U.S. aid funneled through
the Colombian military, from narcotics trafficking.
Right-wing chieftain Carlos Castaño has long been
associated with the vestiges of the Cali drug cartel. His death
squads in the north have assisted aggressive land grabs for
companies like Occidental, Shell, BP and Texaco, as well as
guarding the narcotics export infrastructure. Conservative
estimates put the number of death squad murders in the past
decade above 25,000, and 1.2 million peasants have been
displaced by right-wing violence.
This displacement by violence is directly supported by oil
and mining companies and by big landowners. The Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC-EP, are the only force
in the region that protects now-landless peasants from further
violence. Direct army complicity demonstrates to peasants that
they are being attacked by their own government on behalf of
foreign investors.
They see the guerrilla struggle, then, in the same terms
that the Vietnamese National Liberation Front did--a fight
against colonial rule enforced by the Colombian military and
paramilitary as colonial surrogates.
Between the military and the paramilitary, whose operations
and intelligence apparatuses were merged under CIA direction in
1991, Colombian forces are now committing the most massive
human-rights violations in this hemisphere. Said Carlos
Salinas, Amnesty International's advocacy director for Latin
America and the Caribbean, who is generally no advocate for the
revolutionaries: "If you liked El Salvador, you're going to
love Colombia. It's the same death squads, the same military
aid, and the same whitewash from Washington."
Drug czar and former SOUTHCOM Army Commander Barry McCaffrey
recently spilled the beans: "[Operations in Colombia are] to
recover the southern part of the country."
Drug charges hide politics
While the U.S. government provides direct and indirect
support to elements in Colombia that profit most from the drug
trade, it has launched a tidal wave of disinformation
attempting to portray Colombian guerrillas as drug traffickers.
Even President Pastrana himself, also no friend of the
Colombian insurgents, and former U.S. Ambassador to Colombia
Miles Frechette say there is no evidence to support such a
charge.
The demonization of this 35-year-old popular insurgency is
manufactured by the CIA and uncritically regurgitated by the
U.S. mainstream press.
Guerrillas tax agricultural production, including coca.
That's not drug trafficking. The increased production of coca
by peasants has been decried by FARC leader Manuel Marulanda,
who has long demanded that the government initiate a program
for crop transition.
Increased coca production by peasants is directly related to
forced dislocations by the right-wing paramilitaries. U.S.
intelligence estimates, which are probably high, say the FARC
levies taxes on coca amounting to around $30 million a year.
Since the FARC is now administering a large area of the
country, this is not a lot of money.
The net profit from coca in Colombia is believed to be
around $5 billion a year. This means the "narco-guerrillas," a
term McCaffrey shakes like an evil fetish in front of Congress,
are pulling in a whopping six-tenths of a percent of the
gross--from growers only, who have little choice of crop.
Former CIA officer Ralph McGehee says: "In Colombia today we
attack 'narco guerrillas' or 'narco Communists' or 'narco
terrorists,' as we quickly slide into the Latin version of the
Vietnam quagmire. Does ... intelligence recognize or reflect
this--of course not."
According to McGehee, a highly decorated CIA veteran,
"Disinformation is a large part of [the CIA's] covert action
responsibility, and the American people are the primary target
audience of its lies."
As a veteran of a number of U.S. adventures--Vietnam,
Guatemala, El Salvador, Grenada, Somalia, Peru, Colombia and
Haiti--I have come to agree. Some will say that by taking this
position, I am supporting the FARC. They would be right.
Imperialism is the enemy of us all, and the FARC is on the
front lines against imperialism. It's very simple to an old
soldier. Remember Vietnam!
Stan Goff is a retired Special Forces master sergeant and
author of "Hideous Dream: Racism and the U.S. Army in the
Invasion of Haiti," a book to be released this fall by
Softskull Press about the 1994 U.S. military intervention in
Haiti, in which he participated. He lives in Raleigh,
N.C.
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