- Asked on Thursday about plans to locate U.S. troops on Colombian bases, State Department spokesman Robert Wood simply said, “The United States has no plans to put bases in Colombia,” and went on to the next question. This curt, disingenuous response is terribly unhelpful at a time when Hugo Chávez is scoring political points railing against the ongoing base negotiations, even moderate leaders like Lula and Bachelet are voicing opposition, and Colombian President Ãlvaro Uribe had to spend an entire week traveling throughout South America to explain the base proposal to the region’s presidents. The way the basing deal has been presented to the region – “we’re increasing our presence on your continent, our mission will be broader, but we’re not going to tell you anything about it” – has undone much of the progress that President Obama had been making on U.S.-Latin American relations.
- Note added 8:30AM August 8: President Obama went beyond the State Department’s reticence in an exchange with Hispanic media reporters late on the afternoon of Friday, August 7: “There have been those in the region who have been trying to play this up as part of a traditional anti-Yankee rhetoric. This is not accurate. … We have had a security agreement with Colombia for many years now. We have updated that agreement. We have no intent in establishing a U.S. military base in Colombia.”
- This press briefing took place the same day that the Wall Street Journal reported on a letter the State Department sent to Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) with the headline “U.S. Decides Not to Impose Sanctions on Honduras.” This inspired the following exchange on Honduras, which hardly needs additional comment.
MR. WOOD: [W]e’re going to continue to try to convince both parties and go from there. But a coup took place in the country, and –
QUESTION: Well, you haven’t officially legally declared it a coup yet.
MR. WOOD: We have called it a coup. What we have said is that we legally can’t determine it to be a military coup. That review is still ongoing.
QUESTION: Why does it take so long to review whether there’s a military coup or not?
MR. WOOD: Well, look, there are a lot of legal issues here that have to be carefully examined before we can make that determination, and it requires information being shared amongst a number of parties. We need to be able to take a look at that information and make our best legal judgment as to whether or not –
QUESTION: It seems to be taking a very long time.
MR. WOOD: Well, things take time when you’re dealing with these kinds of very sensitive legal issues.
- Indigenous leaders were killed in Putumayo and Cauca, Colombia, this week. At least eight indigenous people have been killed in Cauca since July, and 67 so far this year in Colombia. Following a July 22-27 visit to Colombia, the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples, James Anaya, issued a press statement placing particular blame on “illegal armed groups, especially the FARC,” for attacks on indigenous Colombians. The statement also notes that “allegations of human rights violations by members of the security forces persist and remain unresolved.”
- After four years, Colombia’s prosecutor-general (fiscal general), Mario Iguarán, finished his term and left office. Assessments of his performance were generally positive, noting that although Iguarán served as a vice-minister of justice under President Uribe, he frequently showed independence from his old boss by pursuing politically sensitive cases like “para-politics,” “false positives” and other human rights cases against the military. (The prosecutor-general’s office is a separate branch of government in Colombia.) Iguarán’s replacement has not been ratified. President Uribe last month sent a list of three possible nominees for the Supreme Court’s approval, the most prominent among them Uribe’s former defense minister and OAS ambassador, Camilo Ospina. The court has so far refused to approve any of the three. It sent a letter to President Uribe “whether he insists on presenting the same names or whether he would prefer to reconsider them and present a new list of nominees.”
- Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez got a lot of attention this week for his opposition to U.S. use of Colombian bases, his denial that Swedish-made rockets were smuggled from Venezuela to the FARC during his government, and his intention to buy Russian tanks. Attacks on the media inside Venezuela received less attention. A group of government supporters stormed the headquarters of the country’s remaining pro-opposition television network, Globovisión, and set off tear-gas canisters. (President Chávez condemned the attack and promised to punish the ardently pro-Chávez ringleader.) More disturbingly, as The Guardian and others reported,
The government’s telecommunications agency said it would revoke the licences of up to 240 radio stations, almost 40% of the total, citing irregular paperwork. … The move followed last week’s introduction of a draft law to jail journalists and broadcasters who “harm the interests of the state”, “cause panic” or “disturb social peace.”
- On the 184th anniversary of the foundation of Bolivia’s armed forces, La Razón, a center-right La Paz daily, published a group of articles looking at the current state of civil-military relations in the country. One of the principal changes during the Evo Morales government has been greater military involvement in social and economic development projects. “At some point we have to change the concept of support for development, which includes them [the armed forces] as a helper. I think they should be the pillar of development,” Defense Minister Walker San Miguel says in an interview.
August 8th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Off topic, but related to Kyle’s kind postings in the previous thread.
I agree that the role of the US in the creation of the paras is limited to non-existent. I’ve heard there is one “exception” that doesn’t involve the US gov’t but an American multinational (I think it’s the Texas Petroleum) that in the 80’s sold some land at nominal prices to retired Army officers so that they would be “responsible for the security” of the area and… you get the drift. But I don’t have published sources for this and, anyway, it doesn’t refer to the US gov’t.
To go on a tangent, some circles in the Colombian left make a lot of the 1967 decree that allowed the creation of self-defense groups. But this seems to me misguided because, to my knowledge, none of the paramilitaries were created following the legal framework of that decree. I think this has red-herring written all over it.
I agree that the new paramilitary are not as assertive in politics as the previous generation. I’ve been wondering about this for a while and am gravitating toward a hypothesis that I want to float here: in many areas of the country, the counterinsurgency has entered its “prophylactic” stage, that is, all that is needed from the COIN point of view is to prevent the emergence of serious dissent and that you can do with a little bit of intimidation instead of the large-scale massacres of the past. In that context, local elites do not need the type of militias the paramilitaries used to form.
That said, I discern, and I’m not alone in this, an unmistakeable pattern of trying to preserve the territorial gains of the paramilitary. Throughout all the Justice and Peace process, the government has gone to great lengths, even embarrassing itself, to make sure that the land expropriated by the paramilitary never returns to its original owners. So, just like in the wars of the middle ages, the victors become a new economic elite of their own. For the time being, these new economic-military elites will have little reason to become very vocal politically (especially with so many good friends in high places…). But I think there is little doubt that they will form the backbone of the reactionary forces of the future when the new social and economic conflicts erupt. In fact, I would go as far as saying that that is the main reason they have been so pampered throughout all the process.
I would appreciate comments, be it from Kyle or from somebody else who has serious interest in thinking this stuff through.
August 8th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
According to the book Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990, by Michael McClintock, paramilitary counter-terror was a hallmark of cold-war era counterinsurgency tactics taught by US military advisers in numerous host countries, including Colombia. Following are some excerpts:
“A key role for a mirror image of the terror of “armed propaganda†had, in fact, become a part of U.S. unconventional warfare doctrine, reflected both in the routine tactics of U. S. “guerrilla†forces, and in written doctrine. The most recent manifestation of unconventional warfare doctrine to reach the public was the 1983 Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare manual issued to contra forces by the CIA. Its content confirms the continuing acceptance of counterterror tactics by U.S. military and paramilitary forces specializing in psychological, political, and unconventional warfare.:
“Although the potential of U.S. forces was stressed, the objective in counterinsurgency was to assist the host country’s own nationals to wage the war with the insurgents. Counterorganization provided a blue-print through which the local civilian population could be integrated into the host country effort. Civilians could be organized into elite covert strike forces using “guerrilla†tactics, into paramilitary formations performing static guard duty, or vast organizations combining political and paramilitary aspects. Participation could be voluntary or obligatory, enforced by a range of coercive alternatives. The doctrine provided for the mobilization of sympathetic social sectors on the counterinsurgent’s behalf and an organizational basis through which a neutral—or suspect—population could be regimented and controlled. The military definition of “paramilitaryâ€â€”forces or groups “distinct from the regular armed forces of any country but resembling them in organization, equipment, training, or missionâ€â€”was itself rather vague.45 In practical usage, it came to apply to everything from home guard—style militias to the counterguerrilla ‘death squad.’”
“Regarding paramilitary organization, American doctrine since the advent of the Cold War had always reflected a traditional military distrust of armed civilians, of any ilk. The paramilitary TEA battalions of Cold War Greece, the counterguerrillas of the Philippines, and the diverse paramilitary formations of Latin America since 1961 all used active and reserve military personnel to control civilian irregulars. In Colombia, where the irregular forces are an integral part of the national defense establishment, officers or NCOs command and train paramilitary units.58″
http://www.statecraft.org/chapter10.html
August 8th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
I don’t debate that at all El Comun, my point was that paramilitaries did not originate from US policy – I never said they were not a tool of it…Also, this defenition if paramilitarism is somewhat vague and has the same gaps that I mentioned in my original post…
August 9th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Although El Comun’s quote is apposite, when it comes to Colombia proper, I’m with Kyle on this one. I haven’t seen yet the evidence tracing the origin of the paramilitary to the US gov’t. Of course, the US has known of the ties of the paramilitaries with the Army and have rarely complained, which means that the US historically has somehow signed off on the whole thing.
I’d like to know people’s thoughts on the new generation of paramilitary. Kyle stressed that their political links are hard to figure out. I agree with caveats, like I already said. Any more thoughts?
August 9th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Kyle and lfm,
What do you think of this?
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB243/index.htm
August 9th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
I don’t have a big problem with State’s response that there are no new military bases. What’s wrong with the facts? Why should everyone believe everything Hugo Chavez says? The US sent Jim Jones (not the FARC Jim Jones or the KoolAid Jim Jones, but the other one) over to Brazil to explain what was going on and that was the end of the matter. Calm exposure of the facts goes a long way toward throwing cold water on the hyped up semantic fireworks of Hugo Chavez. Just as ‘base’ and ‘military base’ is something Chavez made up for his own self-serving purposes, so is ‘coup’ and ‘military coup’ in Honduras the same kind of semantic trick. In both cases, Chavez was distorting what was going on, using a loaded buzzward and whipping up populist fury to mask his own growing failures at home.
August 9th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
El Comun: I haven’t gone through all the documents, only the executive summary, but this is my reaction. I don’t have any reason to believe the information there is correct. I’m sure that over the past 25 years the US has found much to like in the activities of Colombia’s paramilitary. But the report you mention refers to the early 90s. Any account of the origins of the paramilitary will have to trace things back to the early 80s. It was around 86 and 87 when the paramilitary launched a murderous rampage against the UP and anything else that moved left. As far as we know, these “self-defense groups” were a creation of local landholders in the Magdalena Medio. Call me naive, but I think that at that point the central government was not involved and possibly wanted to stop the thing but couldn’t, partly because it lacked the spine to stand up to important power brokers in the provinces. I doubt the US had direct involvement at that stage, which is the crucial one. Like I said before, I have it on the authority of people I trust that the Texaco planted the seeds of some paramilitary groups, but that’s another story. The documents you bring up refer to the 90s, especially the persecution against Escobar. But at that point a lot of water and blood had already flown under the bridge.
Of course, if I see evidence of involvement of the US gov’t in the genesis of the paramilitary I will be open minded about it. You know I don’t have any hidden agenda about that. May I close by saying that I’m enjoying the civility and instructiveness of this exchange?
August 9th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
El Comun: I’ve read those documents, and again, you seem to have missed my point. Please re-read what I’ve written…
August 10th, 2009 at 2:24 am
Kyle said, “my point was that paramilitaries did not originate from US policy ”
lfm said, “Any account of the origins of the paramilitary will have to trace things back to the early 80s”
The point I have been trying to prove is that:
1) paramilitary groups that were organized and trained to counter communist insurgencies have existed in Colombia since the 1960s.
2) the US had much to do with their creation.
Here is an excerpt from a Human Rights Watch document Colombia’s Killer Networks: The Military-Paramilitary Partnership and the United States
“By 1962, he had brought in U.S. Special Forces to train Colombian officers in cold war counterinsurgency. Colombian officers also began training at U.S. bases.[7] That year, a U.S. Army Special Warfare team visited Colombia to help refine Plan Lazo, a new counterinsurgency strategy General Ruiz was drafting.[8] U.S. advisors proposed that the United States “select civilian and military personnel for clandestine training in resistance operations in case they are needed later.†Led by Gen. William P. Yarborough, the team further recommended that this structure “be used to perform counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions and as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents. It should be backed by the United States.â€[9] Judging by the events that followed, the U.S. recommendations were implemented enthusiastically through Plan Lazo, formally adopted by the Colombian military on July 1, 1962.[10] ”
http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,HRW,,COL,,3ae6a8530,0.html
Now you may argue that there is no direct connection between the paramilitary groups that were created with the help of the Kennedy administration and the groups that eventually morphed into the AUC. I am not aware of any such links, nevertheless the doctrine of paramilitary counter-insurgency/counterterror had been in existence in Colombia for decades prior to the creation of Los Pepes, Convivir, the AUC, etc. Maybe we are all actually tacitly agreeing with one another…but arguing different points. I am just trying to bring a little historical perspective to the discussion.
August 10th, 2009 at 9:39 am
El Comun – you might want to go back to my first post on the paramilitary article. There you will find MY opinion instead of combining two people’s (different) opinions. I trace paramilitaries farther back than the 1960s for example…as in the doctrine existed before the 1960s…
August 10th, 2009 at 9:40 am
Oh yeah, my first post is from the last blog entry Adam did – about Uribe’s re-election, it may still be the last one.
August 10th, 2009 at 10:30 am
OK. I have no problem with the idea that the DOCTRINE is old and the US may have been instrumental in bringing it about. Even there, I think that by the 60s, and I take this to be Kyle’s point also, Colombians were already very experienced in the creation of paramilitary groups and hardly needed any extra prodding. The “pajaros” were vicious “partisan cleansers” just like the AUC. Interestingly enough, and I haven’t seen people making this parallel, once the most blood-soaked pajaros stopped being useful, their former patrons turned against them and they were sent to Gorgona which was like extradition 60s style.
August 10th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Not that it matters…but it’s good to see that there’s at least some rational debate about this from people (such as Kyle) who aren’t as easy targets as I am.
Gives me a tiny bit of hope for this place, at least with respect to some of its visitors.
Regards,
Marcos