Washington's death squad democracy in Colombia

22 September 2008. A World to Win News Service. The three-way alliance between the Colombian government of Alvaro Uribe, the rightwing death squads that have murdered tens of thousands of people over the last decades and the U.S. government has never been so naked. General Mario Montoya, the head of the Colombian army and for years chief liaison between the Colombian and American militaries, has been named as a leading and perhaps chief liaison between the Colombia armed forces and the paramilitaries.

These allegations were made by a paramilitary veteran in closed-door judicial hearings in Medellin, Colombia. The Washington Post obtained a video recording of his testimony, and reporter Juan Forero interviewed the man, Luis Adrian Palacio, in prison. (Washington Post, 17 September). Forero wrote that at least four paramilitary commanders have given similar testimony. Colombian legal officials said that Palacio "has a high degree of credibility" and that General Montoya would be investigated with a view to indictment.

Montoya was officially in charge of administering the enormous amounts of money the U.S. has funnelled to the Colombian armed forces, sums that put them in the same league as the Israeli and Pakistani militaries in terms of American support. Montoya is a frequent visitor to the U.S., and well known in Washington. He received training and at least one medal from the U.S. When the newspaper asked the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to comment on these allegations, Thomas A. Shannon, Jr. said, "He's a great field commander. He’s done very well with the FARC." The U.S. worked through Montoya to orchestrate the July rescue of Ingrid Betancourt and other hostages held by the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). (Washington Post, 3 July) The American official admitted that his government was aware of long-standing charges about Montoya's connections with the paramilitaries, but said it "found nothing to support them."

Actually, there is evidence that the U.S. government not only knows a great deal about the connections between the paramilitaries and the Colombian government, but that it organized these links in the first place. This has been extensively researched and described in many writings, including the report "Colombia's Killer Networks"by Human Rights Watch in 1996. (Also see the documented Wikipedia entry "Paramilitarism in Colombia" and colombiajournal.org)

The paramilitary movement in Colombia, like the FARC, is rooted in the civil war that initially broke out between the Liberal and Conservative parties in 1948 and has gone on mainly in the countryside, with varying intensity, ever since. Today's well-armed rightwing mercenaries are descended from U.S. President John F. Kennedy's Plan LASO in the early 1960s, when the American military worked with local armed forces to set up civilian militias to fight radical and pro-Soviet movements in Latin America. In Colombia, this meant the organization of landlord-led death squads to wage a dirty war against the peasant-based guerrilla movement of that time. In the mid-1960s, much of that movement evolved into the FARC, led by a pro-Soviet party whose strategy was to use armed struggle to bring about the kind of reformist (and somewhat pro-Soviet) regime that the U.S. was determined to avoid in its self-proclaimed "sphere of influence", such as Guatemala (the 1954 CIA coup and the 1966-1996 U.S.-led genocidal war in the countryside, a model for American military advisors in Colombia), Chile (the 1973 CIA coup), Grenada (invaded in 1983), Nicaragua (where the briefly successful rebels were crushed by the U.S.-organized and drug-traffic financed "Contra" death squads and a U.S. blockade and then let themselves be voted out) and El Salvador (where the civil war in the late 1980s and early ‘90s was also somewhat similar to Colombia).

In 1985, FARC, which has always advocated a negotiated settlement of the war and power-sharing with the country's traditional ruling classes, came to an agreement with the Colombian government and tried to convert itself into a legal political party. Paramilitaries working with the police and army murdered at least a thousand of its public activists and candidates for election at various levels – including two presidential candidates – before the so-called peace process officially came to an end. (Another element in the FARC's armed reformist strategy has been hope and sometimes success in getting European backing, as European capital has increasingly contended with the U.S. in Latin America. The reactionary kidnapping and long years of captivity of the Franco-Colombian politician Betancourt became a cynical pretext for many years of contacts and negotiations between FARC and the French government. The collapse of that hope, and now the apparent end of support from Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, are factors in the FARC's current difficulties.)

The organization that eventually came to dominate the paramilitary movement, the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), represented a confluence of old landlords and new ones (with some drug lords acquiring huge amounts of land, and some traditional landlords moving into drugs), the military and the American public and private sector. The U.S. banana company Chiquita Brands admitted to financing the AUC from its founding in 1997 to when it agreed to accept a government amnesty and officially go out of business in 2003. An American congressman who met with AUC leaders said this was only the "tip of the iceberg" in terms of U.S. private support for the paramilitaries. These death squads have helped foreign companies control worker militancy in plantations, factories, gas and oil facilities and other areas of the economy.

But it was the American government, acting through the military and CIA, that trained, armed and led these paramilitaries, both directly and through the Colombian armed forces. The Human Rights Watch report, based on an interview with the retired U.S. Military Attaché in Bogota, describes the 1996 formation of a team formed by the U.S. Embassy Military Group, the U.S. armed forces Southern Command, the CIA and other American agencies to set up a secret network of civilians (including retired army officers) under active-duty army command. The report concludes that while "not all the paramilitaries are intimate partners with the military", the partnership set up was "a sophisticated mechanism, in part supported by years of advice, training, weaponry, and official silence by the United States, that allows the Colombian military to fight a dirty war and Colombian officialdom to deny it."

It would be hard to exaggerate the atrocities the AUC committed. One of its commanders, Ever Veloza, who confessed to killing almost a thousand people and provided details about the killing of 6,000 people by his militias alone, in coordination with the army, said that 90 percent of the victims had no ties to guerrillas. (Washington Post, 19 August) In Mapiripan, in Meta department, in 1997, AUC members came to town with a list of names provided by informants. They went house to house, took people to the town centre, and tortured them to death – hacking them to pieces with machetes or chainsaws and throwing the remains (and sometimes the dismembered still-living) in the river. They killed approximately ten people a day for five days. Local officials called the army repeatedly during this period, but the army didn't come until after the AUC left. The general later accused of planning the massacre had just finished his training by U.S. Army Green Berets working in Colombia. In Alto Naya, in Cauca, in 2001, 90 AUC members killed about 120 people, also with chainsaws and machetes. An Army unit nearby refused to intervene. In Betoyes, in the same department, in 2003, they attacked an indigenous community, raping and killing girls and women in the most horrible manner. Amnesty International reported that the Army supported the massacre. (Various human rights and other publications, cited in the Wikipedia article) These paramilitaries were also active in the slums of Medellin, where they carried out what some people consider to be a genocidal campaign against youth, in Bogota and other cities, assassinating political activists, lawyers, academics, union organizers and others and creating a climate of political terror.

Last year, the Los Angeles Times revealed a CIA report on the links between the Colombian military and the paramilitaries. It described massacres carried out in Medellin during a 2002 anti-FARC offensive called "Operation Orion". General Montoya commanded the police during that operation. The report cites an informant who said that orders for the offensive were signed jointly by Montoya and paramilitary leader Fabio Jaramillo, a subordinate to the successor to Medellin drug lord Pablo Escobar. The CIA refused to confirm or deny the authenticity of the report, but instead attacked the newspaper for "ultimately affecting our ability to protect Americans." (Los Angeles Times,March 27, 2007) Accusations that Montoya was involved with the paramilitaries go back almost thirty years, when as a young lieutenant he first began to rise through the upper ranks of the army. At that time he served in the Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence Battalion (BINCI), a unit that led a campaign of bombings, assassinations and killings of detainees. That this was at least known to the American authorities at the time, if not their handiwork, was recently made clear by the declassification of a formerly secret 1979 report from the U.S. Embassy in Bogota. ("The Truth about Triple A", National Security Archive at George Washington University, www.gwu.ed)

While the accusations about Montoya are especially revealing, he is, after all, only the head of the army. The Uribe government is no less an American "asset" than the general, and no less thoroughly involved with the AUC and other paramilitaries. Over the past two years, formal charges and/or convictions for complicity with the AUC have hit Uribe's brother, a cousin, his Vice President, Defense Minister, party chairman and dozens of his party's members of parliament. It has been alleged that the paramilitaries held secret meetings at Uribe's ranch. Accusations from several different quarters, some of them included in U.S. intelligence reports, have sketched life-long links between Uribe and his family and Pablo Escobar and other Medellin narco-paramilitary leaders. (1991 U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency dispatch posted on the National Security Archive) Whatever internal ruling class disputes may be behind the decisions of judges, politicians from Uribe's own party and other members of Colombia's political class to turn on him, Uribe has reacted by attacking the judiciary and trying to amass even more direct power in the hands of the executive. The massive marches against "terrorism" in many Colombian cities earlier this year were part of Uribe's efforts to legitimise and reinforce these efforts.

Rather than criticizing or cutting ties to people like Uribe and Montoya, the U.S. is now working to protect them from the Colombian judicial system. What the U.S. advertises as a scheme to bring Colombian drug lords to justice is designed to do exactly the opposite: to extradite leaders of the AUC to jails in the U.S. where Colombians cannot question these murderers who used drugs to finance their operations, thus silencing the damaging stream of testimony about the U.S./Uribe/paramilitary axis.

The AUC dissolved (at least officially, although there are indications that some of its killer bands are still operating) not because of any government blows against it but because the same government that secretly paid these mercenaries to fight now publicly offered to pay them to stop. Unlike the FARC, they were allowed to join the political mainstream. When the AUC formally dissolved, its commanders submitted to arrest in the expectation that they would be absolved quickly and recycled into civilian life. But their legal fate has turned out to be more complicated than they and the Uribe regime hoped. Some have languished in prison, where they have talked to civilian investigators. Last May, acting without warning and to general astonishment, Uribe had the main AUC commander and 14 of his senior colleagues plucked from a prison in Medellin and sent to the U.S. More recently the U.S. moved to extradite the above-mentioned Veloza, one of two dozen top AUC commanders to testify before the special judicial proceedings known as the "Justice and Peace" process, who "recounted how the death squads he helped run were supported by army officers and prominent politicians." (Washington Post, 19 August) In that article, reporter Forero writes, "Fifteen other top paramilitary commanders have been extradited to the United States, raising major concerns among Colombian investigators, victims' rights groups and organisations such as Human Rights Watch, all of whom say complex investigations into paramilitary crimes are being thrown into disarray. With nearly all of the top commanders in U.S. jails, they argue, Colombian detectives and prosecutors have lost their most knowledgeable sources of information about paramilitary groups."

It is anything but a given, however, that the exposure of Montoya and the rest will have much effect in and of itself. The partnership of the armed forces and the paramilitaries has been no secret to millions of Colombians who have suffered at their hands. It has been estimated that ten percent of the population has been violently displaced, forced out of the countryside by these allied armed gangs. Their assassinations and terrorism reached into every corner of Colombian society and helped shape much of the country's political and economic landscape, including the growth of agro-industry and other capitalist expansion. In a word, the paramilitaries, with their roots in semi-feudalism, have been an essential factor in shaping the terrain for the country's imperialist-subordinated but real capitalist development. It could be said that the legitimacy of elections and the efficacy of death squads (including the death squad known as the Colombian armed forces) have been twin pillars of Colombia's imperialist-vaunted and imperialist-dominated democracy.

In a May 1st statement entitled "Set Our Sights on the Goal of Communism", the Revolutionary Communist Group (GCR) of Colombia describes this process: "the concentration of land rises dizzyingly, no longer only in the hands of the traditional landowners and the narco-paramilitaries but also in the hands of local capitalists and imperialists who seek the development of the biofuel industry; the increase in forced displacement; increasing subordination of the country to imperialism – mainly Yankee but also European, Japanese and Australian – not only in the economic sphere but also the political, military and judicial. For the ruling classes, landlords and capitalists who are allied with and appendages of imperialism, the 'solution' to the crisis, that is, the solution to their problems – which are not the problems of the majority of people but the people’s resistance to greater exploitation – is more repression, legal and illegal, aiming to crush the slightest breath of the people's struggles, developing the tendency towards fascistization.

"With the conversion of the mass media into a shameless propaganda tool for the genocidal Uribe regime, they have succeeded in winning over a significant section of the working people. But this has not led to the surrender of other equally significant sections of the people. It has sharpened political polarization, as was seen in the massive marches on 4 February (organized by the government and its allies) and on 6 March (organized by various opposition forces). What is needed is a polarization of another kind, going from resistance to revolution."

A World to Win News Service is put out by A World to Win magazine (aworldtowin.org), a political and theoretical review inspired by the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the embryonic center of the world’s Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties and organizations.

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