U.S. Press Unconcerned: The Culture of Fear Continues in Colombia

[Judi Lynn]

March 24, 2014
U.S. Press Unconcerned

The Culture of Fear Continues in Colombia

by DANIEL KOVALIK

Back in 1996, Noam Chomsky wrote a quite terrifying piece about the U.S.-backed “Dirty War” in Colombia, and in Latin America generally, entitled, “The Culture of Fear.” [1] This article was an introduction to the magnificent book by Father Javier Giraldo, S.J., entitled, The Genocidal Democracy. In this piece, Chomsky wrote,

“Two facts should be uppermost in the minds of North American readers of Father Giraldo’s documentation of the reign of terror that engulfed Colombia during the “Dirty War” waged by the state security forces and their paramilitary associates from the early 1980s. The first is that the “democra-tatorship,” as Eduardo Galeano termed this amalgam of democratic forms and totalitarian terror, has managed to compile the worst human rights record in the hemisphere in recent years, no small achievement when one considers the competition. The second is that Colombia has had accessories in crime, primary among them the government of the United States . . . (which has) helped to train and arm the assassins and torturers of the narco-military-landowner network that maintains ‘stability’ in a country that is rich in promise, and a nightmare for many of its people.”

As Chomsky further explained, the U.S. bears primary blame for Colombia’s paramilitary state which has carried out this terror against its own population because the U.S. created the paramilitaries haunting Colombia. Chomsky cites Colombia’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa who explained that during the Kennedy Administration, Washington ‘‘took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads.’” Chomsky explains that the “‘Dirty War’ escalated in the early 1980s – not only in Colombia – as the Reagan administration extended these programs throughout the region, leaving it devastated, strewn with hundreds of thousands of corpses tortured and mutilated people who might otherwise have been insufficiently supportive of the establishment, perhaps even influenced by ‘subversives.’”

In the 1980’s, the U.S. support for death squad states in such countries as El Salvador, Guatemala and Colombia was fairly well known amongst the U.S. population, and was discussed in the press on an intermittent basis. I recall, for example, watching news segments about this phenomenon on 60 Minutes and even remember that this was a topic of conversation in the U.S. Catholic Church. Today, however, this is not a matter of public discourse, is hardly ever mentioned in the press, and most Americans, even ones very well informed, have therefore been led to believe that such death squad states are a thing of the past.

The new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Buenaventura, Colombia, however, demonstrates that the “Dirty War” is not a thing of the past, but is in fact ongoing, and that the paramilitary state the U.S. helped to construct back in the 1960’s continues to reign over Colombia to this very day, and with continued U.S. backing. [2]

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/24/the-death-squads-embassy-in-washington/