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.
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http://truth-out.org/news/item/19262-petraeus-statement-on-plan-colombia-at-odds-with-reality
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...are accomplished.
This article is too polite.
Let me unbury the naked horror of U.S. policy in Colombia from this paragraph:
"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."--from the OP
$7 BILLION in U.S. taxpayer military funding to Colombia, while the Colombian military was slaughtering thousands of innocent people and dressing up their bodies in guerilla uniforms "to justify continued" billions of U.S. taxpayer booty "from Washington"!
The U.S. DOESN'T CARE how many innocent people die horrible deaths, nor how high the mountain of bodies becomes, as long as U.S. corporate/military objectives are achieved.
And the upshot is this truly "Alice in Wonderland" nightmare of the Colombian military KILLING people, to up their "body count," to GET MORE OF OUR MONEY from the lying liars in Congress who appropriate our money for these purposes and the Executive Branch that lards our money on these killers!
It should be noted, also, that some of the targets of the Colombian military and its closely tied rightwing death squads were (are!) labor leaders and other advocates of the poor, which serves the objectives of the U.S./Colombia "free trade for the rich" agreement. And another target was the FIVE MILLION PEASANT FARMERS who have been brutally displaced from their farm lands, an abomination that also serves U.S. "free trade for the rich."
It is difficult not to despair when contemplating U.S. policy in Colombia. We think the horrors of Iraq are some kind of aberration? The scale of death, concerning which the U.S. government is completely uncaring, callous and oblivious, in Iraq, was far greater, of course--a hundred thousand innocent people slaughtered in the first weeks of "shock and awe" bombing alone. But the PATTERN had already been set, in Colombia. Rumsfeld/Cheney just built a higher mountain of babies' limbs, grandparents' heads, pregnant women's breasts, and other body parts of teenagers, shopkeepers, teachers, nurses, cooks, bus drivers, clerks, food vendors, car mechanics, fathers, mothers and other ordinary people under the horror of U.S. bombs.
The U.S. DIDN'T CARE. As it DIDN'T CARE in Colombia and DOESN'T CARE now.
Oh, I do think that the Obama administration "free tradists" are a bit fussier about appearances than the Bush Junta. For instance, they support the peace talks with the FARC guerrillas, or those talks wouldn't be happening. But what we need to understand is the CONTINUUM, from slaughter to "free trade" in Colombia--with the slaughter started by Bill Clinton and escalated by the Bush Junta, then Obama signing the "free trade for the rich" agreement with Colombia--and a similar pattern now in Honduras (death to leftists as prep for "free trade"
--and the CONTINUUM of the Bush Junta effort to impose "free trade" by means of slaughter in Iraq, with the pre-Bush Junta "free tradists" (Bill Clinton) prepping Iraq for that slaughter ("sanctions," "no fly zone"--destroying Iraq's air force, etc.) and attempted imposition. They got the oil contracts signed--the Bush Junta's main objective--but failed utterly at creating a government capable of imposing "free trade" in other respects, so the follow-up (by Obama) was to abandon that effort. Iraq is now in chaos--all caused by us. And it is probably being deliberately kept in chaos so as to prevent a government developing that is capable of retrieving control of Iraq's oil.
The murder, the slaughter, the social chaos are DELIBERATE policies of the U.S. government. In Colombia (also Mexico and Honduras), social chaos is obviously one objective of the U.S. "war on drugs." Another is the militarization of society--fascist control of the government--and the creation of Pentagon "forward operating locations" and outright military bases. The U.S. government DOESN'T CARE how many people die, so long as U.S. (corporate/war profiteer) objectives are achieved. In fact, the fear, the terror, the police-state methods, the vast displacement, and all the murders of the "war on drugs," official and otherwise, are quite useful as to imposing "free trade the for the rich" and expanding the Pentagon's footprint in the region.
