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IS COLOMBIA THE NEXT VIETNAM?
An essay by former Green Baret Stan Goff
30.07.2002 (By Stan Goff/Workers World News Service)
On my 19th birthday, I departed McChord Air Force Base for Vietnam.
I was told I was going to fight for democracy there. The people back home were being told the same thing.
I found the truth was substantially different.
On the ground, we waged war not for democracy, but against the entire Vietnamese people. It cost billions of dollars and 58,000 American lives--as well as over 3,000,000 lives among the people of Southeast Asia--before we discovered that we had been manipulated by a vast military-industrial complex, a compliant press, and cynical political demagogues.
In 1996, I retired from 3rd Special Forces after having participated in my last massive deception of the people of the United States--again allegedly to protect democracy--in Haiti.
They are doing it again. The people of the United States are being led down the garden path in Colombia.
Under cover of the "fight against communism," we surrendered trillions of dollars from our national treasury to support criminals: Jonas Savimbi in Angola, Roberto D'Aubuisson in El Salvador, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, Romeo Lucas Garcia in Guatemala, Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, François Duvalier in Haiti and so forth.
Our treasury also supported drug traffickers. The Central Intelligence Agency trained, equipped and financed the opium empires of the Golden Triangle, the narcotics-financed Chinese Nationalists, the Corsican Mafia, the Sicilian Mafia, the U.S. Mafia, Afghani-Pakistani heroin traders, the drug kings of the bloodthirsty Guatemalan G-2, key members of Mexico's Guadalajara Cartel, the cocaine-financed Contras of Nicaragua, drug traffickers with the Peruvian National Intelligence Service (SIN), the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army--a Balkan criminal network responsible for over 20 percent of Europe's heroin imports--and the Cali drug cartel in Colombia.
These activities were undertaken in every case to protect capitalist profits. They still are.
The profound irony--or the profound deception--is that the justification for U.S. military escalation in Colombia is a war on drugs.
The House of Representatives has already approved a $1.7-billion "aid package" for Colombia. The lion's share of that "aid" is for the Colombian military.
To sell this "aid" to the people here, we are being told that the U.S. Special Forces already training Colombia's armed forces are there to "assist in the counter-narcotics effort."
I was on one of those teams in Colombia in 1992, with the same story. It was a lie then, and it is a lie now.
We said one thing, did another
We were explicitly told that due to political sensitivities, any discussion of the mission to Colombia--like all missions going down from 7th Special Forces--was to be represented as part of the counter-narcotics effort. This was not a directive to clarify our mission, but to clarify how we were to represent the mission.
What we conducted was counter-insurgency training.
We were based at Tolemaida, the Peruvian Special Forces base. The troops we trained not only did not attempt to hide their mission--to prosecute the war against Marxist guerrillas--they were deployed to conduct operations on the weekend breaks.
The Colombian Army was losing ground. Their officers were corrupt; many involved themselves in drug traffic. There was racism in the ranks directed at Indigenous and Afro-Colombian troops.
Their long-standing record of abuses against civilians had earned fear and hatred from the people. Many of the officers--while physically tough and full of bravado--were incompetent planners and uninspiring leaders.
Anyone who knows the history of Vietnam will remember that a similar situation existed in South Vietnam after the United States took the role of colonial overseer. Ngo Dinh Diem, hand-picked by the United States, exercised tenuous control over a hodge-podge of corrupt military factions, each representing different interests.
President Andres Pastrana of Colombia finds himself in much the same situation today.
Our job was to begin teaching the fundamentals of night patrolling and the integration of infantry operations with heliborne infiltration and extraction. A previous team of specially trained American chopper pilots had just finished teaching their Air Force rotor-wing pilots how to operate at night.
The subject of every tactical discussion with Colombian planners was how to fight guerrillas, not drugs.
The U. S. military is involving itself in a civil war. People who remember Vietnam should find this very familiar.
It began with a decision by the president, the national security advisor, and the secretary of defense not to "cede" Vietnam. The interests that drove that decision were manifold. McCarthyism's impact gave the decision momentum of its own. The strategic decision was actually about filling post-World War II colonial vacuums with American influence, and with protecting current and future investments in Asia.
In Colombia, the U.S. interest is regional as well. Colombia sits in an oil- and mineral-rich region that includes Venezuela, Brazil and Ecuador, where populist and anti-imperialist movements are gaining strength. The United States sees Colombia as the front line against this current, and as a necessary foothold in the region.
John F. Kennedy won an uncomfortably close presidential election against Richard Nixon in 1960. Nixon relentlessly baited Kennedy for being "soft on communism." Now the fear is to be labeled "soft on drugs."
Washington propped up a doddering regime against a popular insurgency in Vietnam. Pastrana's administration is certainly being ripped apart by at least as many competing factions as Diem's.
Will Pastrana go the way of Diem?
Colombians perceive Pastrana as Washington's man. But he is under pressure to make a deal with the guerrillas to end the civil war. The guerrillas' demands for land reform, crop subsidies, social services and commodity price indexation are considered off-limits by the U.S. administration.
Recent attacks against Pastrana by the U.S. capitalist press--usually a precursor to the U.S. foreign policy establishment dumping a client--should give the Colombian president pause. He should think of Diem, dead in the back of an armored personnel carrier after a coup directed by the U.S. government.
The Clinton administration is now requesting that the ceiling for U.S. military advisors in Colombia be raised from 100 to 170. That's just the way it happened in Vietnam.
In Pastrana's July counter-offensive last year, U.S. military pilots were flying active, direct-support tactical reconnaissance missions. One aircraft was lost, and the Department of Defense has been mute about the circumstances.
The Colombian military is intimately linked to networks of right-wing paramilitaries--death squads--that receive a large portion of their funding, apart from U.S. aid funneled through the Colombian military, from narcotics trafficking.
Right-wing chieftain Carlos Castaño has long been associated with the vestiges of the Cali drug cartel. His death squads in the north have assisted aggressive land grabs for companies like Occidental, Shell, BP and Texaco, as well as guarding the narcotics export infrastructure. Conservative estimates put the number of death squad murders in the past decade above 25,000, and 1.2 million peasants have been displaced by right-wing violence.
This displacement by violence is directly supported by oil and mining companies and by big landowners. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC-EP, are the only force in the region that protects now-landless peasants from further violence. Direct army complicity demonstrates to peasants that they are being attacked by their own government on behalf of foreign investors.
They see the guerrilla struggle, then, in the same terms that the Vietnamese National Liberation Front did--a fight against colonial rule enforced by the Colombian military and paramilitary as colonial surrogates.
Between the military and the paramilitary, whose operations and intelligence apparatuses were merged under CIA direction in 1991, Colombian forces are now committing the most massive human-rights violations in this hemisphere. Said Carlos Salinas, Amnesty International's advocacy director for Latin America and the Caribbean, who is generally no advocate for the revolutionaries: "If you liked El Salvador, you're going to love Colombia. It's the same death squads, the same military aid, and the same whitewash from Washington."
Drug czar and former SOUTHCOM Army Commander Barry McCaffrey recently spilled the beans: "[Operations in Colombia are] to recover the southern part of the country."
Drug charges hide politics
While the U.S. government provides direct and indirect support to elements in Colombia that profit most from the drug trade, it has launched a tidal wave of disinformation attempting to portray Colombian guerrillas as drug traffickers. Even President Pastrana himself, also no friend of the Colombian insurgents, and former U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Miles Frechette say there is no evidence to support such a charge.
The demonization of this 35-year-old popular insurgency is manufactured by the CIA and uncritically regurgitated by the U.S. mainstream press.
Guerrillas tax agricultural production, including coca. That's not drug trafficking. The increased production of coca by peasants has been decried by FARC leader Manuel Marulanda, who has long demanded that the government initiate a program for crop transition.
Increased coca production by peasants is directly related to forced dislocations by the right-wing paramilitaries. U.S. intelligence estimates, which are probably high, say the FARC levies taxes on coca amounting to around $30 million a year. Since the FARC is now administering a large area of the country, this is not a lot of money.
The net profit from coca in Colombia is believed to be around $5 billion a year. This means the "narco-guerrillas," a term McCaffrey shakes like an evil fetish in front of Congress, are pulling in a whopping six-tenths of a percent of the gross--from growers only, who have little choice of crop.
Former CIA officer Ralph McGehee says: "In Colombia today we attack 'narco guerrillas' or 'narco Communists' or 'narco terrorists,' as we quickly slide into the Latin version of the Vietnam quagmire. Does ... intelligence recognize or reflect this--of course not."
According to McGehee, a highly decorated CIA veteran, "Disinformation is a large part of [the CIA's] covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target audience of its lies."
As a veteran of a number of U.S. adventures--Vietnam, Guatemala, El Salvador, Grenada, Somalia, Peru, Colombia and Haiti--I have come to agree. Some will say that by taking this position, I am supporting the FARC. They would be right.
Imperialism is the enemy of us all, and the FARC is on the front lines against imperialism. It's very simple to an old soldier. Remember Vietnam!
Stan Goff is a retired Special Forces master sergeant and author of "Hideous Dream: Racism and the U.S. Army in the Invasion of Haiti," a book about the 1994 U.S. military intervention in Haiti, in which he participated. He lives in Raleigh, N.C., USA
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