Petraeus' Statement on Plan Colombia at Odds With Reality
Petraeus' Statement on Plan Colombia at Odds With Reality
Monday, 07 October 2013 09:01
By Eileen O'Grady, Center for Economic Policy Research | News Analysis
Last week, former CIA director David Petraeus coauthored a column with the Brookings Institute’s Michael O’Hanlon hailing U.S. policy in Colombia as “one of the best stories on the national security front of the 21st century to date.” That same day, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos stood before the United Nations in New York and recalled the more than 220,000 people who have been killed in the conflict over the past 50 years, emphasizing the “harsh and ugly reality of a conflict that [is] unfortunately, still in force.”
The juxtaposition of the two leaders’ statements points toward the U.S.’s ongoing focus on a militarized approach to the war on drugs, despite overwhelming evidence that suggests that Plan Colombia has been, according to Amnesty International, “a failure in every respect.”
Petraeus, a key driver of U.S. efforts to increase drone operations in the Middle East, touts Plan Colombia as a “success story” because of the massive increase in the size of Colombia’s armed forces and influx of new intelligence and targeting technology. Such measures for Colombia’s success remain predictably superficial, and are, moreover, divorced from the program’s stated aims to reduce cultivation and drug-related violence. While there has indeed been an increase in military presence since Plan Colombia’s inception in 2000, it has by no means been a victory for U.S. “security assistance.”
A report by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the U.S. Office on Colombia finds alarming links between U.S. military funding to Colombia and extrajudicial civilian deaths. According to their research, in areas where the U.S. is involved in Colombian military efforts, civilian killings by the military increased after the U.S. increased its assistance. According to a 2012 report by the International Federation for Human Rights, at least 3,000 of such killings have been cases of “false positives,” where soldiers killed civilians and then dressed their bodies in guerilla uniforms to artificially boost their body counts. The Colombian military is alleged to have encouraged the higher body counts to justify continued military aid from Washington, which was by no means oblivious. In analyzing classified U.S. documents, Michael Evans of the National Security Archive found that as early as 1994, even before implementing Plan Colombia, “CIA and senior U.S. diplomats were aware…that U.S.-backed Colombian security forces engaged in ‘death squad tactics,’ cooperated with drug-running paramilitary groups, and encouraged a ‘body count syndrome…” To make matters worse, such violence is still met with immense impunity; according to State Department documentation, only 1.5% of reported extrajudicial killings have resulted in convictions.
More:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/19262-petraeus-statement-on-plan-colombia-at-odds-with-reality
