Latin America
Related: About this forumBeyond Ayotzinapa: How U.S. Intervention in Colombia Paved the Way for Mexico’s Human Rights Crisis
Beyond Ayotzinapa: How U.S. Intervention in Colombia Paved the Way for Mexicos Human Rights Crisis
Written by Julia Duranti and Maggie Ervin
Thursday, 18 December 2014 10:57
Until two weeks ago, there were 43 disappeared students in Guerrero, Mexico. Now there are 42. Despite tens of thousands of Mexican protesters chanting, You took them alive! We want them back alive, one of the students was officially pronounced dead on Saturday, December 6. Alexander Mora Venancio was just 19 years old. The identification of his remains was a transnational effort: Mexican officials found them, Austrian scientists tested them, and Argentine forensics verified them. But there are other countries with key roles in this story that have remained largely silent: the U.S. and its closest South American ally, Colombia. While the Mexican government scrambled to present the Ayotzinapa student massacre as a case of low-level corruption that can be solved by shuffling police units and criminalizing the protests that brought international scrutiny, a new report emerged claiming that federal police also participated in the torture and disappearance of the students. U.S. intervention in Colombia shows why the state violence evident in Ayotzinapa is anything but an isolated incident.
Colombia is rarely in the U.S. news these days, despite an ongoing armed conflict well over half a century old. Unlike the Middle East, Colombias guerrilla insurgents, while on the State Department Terrorist List, do not haunt U.S. imaginations as an imminent threat; unlike Central America, Colombias internally displaced personsover 6 million at last countrarely make it to U.S. borders. This lack of coverage masks over 50 years of U.S. involvement. In line with the Cold War doctrine of containing communism at any cost, U.S. military officials under the Kennedy administration created paramilitary self-defense groups, called Plan Laso, to work in tandem with the Colombian state to crush leftist resistance in 1962two years before the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerilla insurgencies were formally constituted. Soon after,Colombian drug cartels emerged to meet U.S. demand for cocaine in the 1970s and 1980s. That ended with the assassination of Medellin cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar in 1993, carried out with U.S. support. The Cali Cartel was defeated just a few years later, opening a vacuum in international cocaine distribution that loose criminal syndicates in Colombia and, notably, ascending cartels in Mexico were happy to fill. The fragmentation of the illicit drug trade in Colombia roughly correlated with market liberalization of the legal economy under President Cesar Gaviria with the slogan, Welcome to the Future, along with the Mexican financial crisis and passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. Throughout the 1990s, the Colombian guerillas gained territory and soldiers, with the FARCs ranks swelling to nearly 20,000 by 2001. This led to several key developments. The first was the 1997 consolidation of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a 30,000-strong paramilitary structure that collaborated with the Colombian military to commit some of the worst human rights violations in the countrys history before undergoing an incomplete demobilization process that left thousands of paramilitary descendants still active across the country. The second was a U.S. counternarcotics and counterinsurgency aid package known as Plan Colombia.
Plan Colombia, Plan Mexico
Soldier in ColombiaPlan Colombia initially consisted of $1.3 billion in supply-side drug interdiction assistance, including a controversial and unique aerial herbicide fumigations program of coca crops, as well as weapons, equipment, technical assistance and training for Colombian military and police. It was signed by U.S. President Bill Clinton and Colombian President Andrés Pastrana in 2000, both of whom were succeeded by conservative presidents with tough counterterrorism ideologies (George W. Bush and Alvaro Uribe, respectively) that kept up support for Plan Colombia through 2007, when the name and strategy shifted to a Consolidation Plan. Presidents Bush and Uribe found a willing ally for the Wars on Drugs and Terror in right-wing Mexican President Felipe Calderoón, elected in 2006 after Mexican drug cartels had risen to prominence. Shortly thereafter, the Mérida Initiativealso known as Plan Mexicowas approved to fight organized crime and associated violence. Since that time, nearly $3 billion in U.S. military aid to Mexico have contributed to the massive militarization of the country: Blackhawk helicopters (at $20 million apiece), thousands of U.S. weapons, extensive training of police and military, increased surveillance of the border and ports, and even U.S. Marshals dressing as Mexican marines to carry out special operations on Mexican soil. The toll on Mexico has been devastating: more than 100,000 dead and more than 26,000 disappeared since 2006.
Photo: Colombia's military is a top recipient of U.S. funding and
training, even as it has committed human rights abuses and
collaborated with paramilitary groups--themselves descendants
of U.S.-designed Plan Laso. With U.S. encouragement, Colombia
is now a major security exporter to Mexico, where similar
patterns of extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances have
developed. Credit: Melissa Cox / Human Pictures
Meanwhile, the U.S. has provided over $8 billion in aid to Colombia, making it one of the top recipients of U.S. military aid in the world. Yet Colombia is still a top supplier of heroin and cocaine to the U.S. The number of victims in Colombias conflict now tops 7 million , including 6 million internally displaced persons, more than 150,000 forced disappearances and more than 930,000 homicides. But a staggering 5.9 million of these human rights violations have occurred just since 2000, when U.S. funding began to bolster public security forces already known for human rights atrocities. Then in 2006 the false positives scandal broke, in which it was revealed that Colombian security forces some trained on U.S. soil at the polemic Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation/School of the Americas (WHINSEC/SOA)systematically murdered at least 5,000 innocent civilians and then dressed them up in guerrilla fatigues, presenting them as enemy kills in order to gain rewards like bonuses and extra vacation time. This practice was developed as part of the body count mentality promoted in U.S. training and occurred on the watch of then-Defense Minister and current President of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos. Later that year, the parapolitics scandal broke, implicating politicians at all levels in narco-paramilitary structures. These groups, now referred to by the Colombian government as criminal bands (BACRIM), continue to enjoy close relationships with both licit and illicit business interests and politicians in Colombia, and pose the greatest threat to citizen expression and social movements: Plan Lasos legacy continuing to pay dividends.
Colombia: Security Exporter
U.S. officials stubbornly defend their investment in Colombias military might and its applicability to Mexico. One U.S. Embassy official in Bogotá said, In 2000 Colombia was on the brink of becoming a failed narcostate. Plan Colombia helped prevent that
now, Colombia is a security exporter. Now the Colombians are training the Mexicans in security. In a visit to Colombia just last week Secretary of State John Kerry echoed that sentiment. Indeed, direct aid to Colombia has declined since 2008 and proportionately increased for the Merida Initiative, and even more recently to the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI). Along with increasing military and counternarcotics aid to these countries ,the U.S. has made a conscious move to use Colombia as a security proxy, providing the U.S. with plausible deniability in the case of human rights abuses committed by their trainees. U.S. General John Kelly got himself into hot water last May by admitting as much. The use of security proxies and continued certification from the U.S. government that Colombia and Mexico are meeting human rights requirements for military aid skirt the spirit of the Leahy Law, which is intended to prevent U.S. funding of militaries that have committed gross human rights abuses.
Given this close relationship, the reasons behind Mexicos violence become clearer. When President Enrique Peña Nieto took office in 2012, he tried to shift the countrys attention to the economy and moving Mexico forward. But torture, arbitrary detentions, kidnappings and disappearances have escalated throughout his two years in office. Although the 43 students made international news, 5,098 Mexicans have been disappeared in 2014 alone.
More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/5153-beyond-ayotzinapa-how-us-intervention-in-colombia-paved-the-way-for-mexicos-human-rights-crisis
Peace Patriot
(24,010 posts)Thank you for posting this!
One thing that our people really need to understand is that the "U.S. war on drugs" has been the prep for "U.S. Free Trade for the Rich"--in Colombia, Mexico, Honduras and elsewhere. Billions of our tax dollars, our military and U.S. agencies such as the DEA and the USAID have been used to murder thousands of labor union leaders, community activists, human rights workers, teachers, peasant farmers and others, and to totally disrupt rural life by brutally displacing millions of peasant farmers from their lands.
This. Is. The. Purpose. Of. The. War. On. Drugs.
This article--one of the first I've read that makes these vital connections--details it this way:
The War on Drugs in Colombia is a smokescreen for economic interests. Yes, drug trafficking plays a role in the violence here, but much more significant are neoliberal economic interests that seek to drive displacement so they can access Colombias land, said a spokesperson for NOMADESC to a Witness for Peace delegation.
Plan Colombia paved the way for the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement a decade later. The fumigations displaced people from their land and left it free for illegal development, as well as creating an exploitable labor force in the cities, said a labor organizer from Buenaventura, referencing the nearly20 million acres of land that was abandoned or illegally acquired in the course of Colombias conflict. The crackdown in the countryside created a more favorable climate for foreign investment. In the end, the rich are the ones who benefit. In this understanding there are clear parallels with NAFTA, which has contributed to mass displacement of a vulnerable labor force from Mexicos countryside to the U.S.--from the OP (my emphasis)
The authors of the OP (Duranti and Ervin) also make some excellent points as to how the "U.S. war on drugs" is accomplishing U.S. corporate goals in Mexico and Colombia:
...Colombians need only look to Mexico, where there is no armed insurgency, to see what the future might hold. Over this past year Pena Nietos administration successfully passed a series of reforms (labor, telecommunications, education, fiscal and energy) whose common thread is privatization. Mexico is open for business was the message, and the U.S. government and multinationals ate it up. The passing of these reforms may not have been possible had it not been for the exhausting distraction of six years of violence leading up to it, as Mexicans were displaced, terrorized and killed by cartels, Mexican security forces, or, all too often, by the collusion of both. (my emphasis) --from the OP
Judi Lynn
(162,220 posts)with absolutely no interference in Colombia, whatsoever, to the total trauma of Colombia's poor for generations on end.
They move at will, the poor cannot turn them back. Pure evil.
Mexico will have hell ahead, if somehow their government continues along its right-wing fascist path.
Thank you, so much, for your comments.