Two facts should be uppermost in the minds of North
American readers of Father Giraldo’s documentation of the reign of terror that
engulfed Colombia during the “Dirty War” waged by the state security forces and
their paramilitary associates from the early 1980s. The first is that
Colombia’s “democra-tatorship,” as Eduardo Galeano termed this amalgam of
democratic forms and totalitarian terror, has managed to compile the worst human
rights record in the hemisphere in recent years, no small achievement when one considers
the competition. The second is that Colombia has had accessories in crime,
primary among them the government of the United States, though Britain, Israel,
Germany, and others have also helped to train and arm the assassins and
torturers of the narco-military-landowner network that maintains “stability” in
a country that is rich in promise, and a nightmare for many of its people.
In July 1989, the U.S. State Department announced
plans for subsidized sales of military equipment to Colombia, allegedly “for
antinarcotics purposes.” The sales were “justified” by the fact that “Colombia
has a democratic form of government and does not exhibit a consistent pattern of
gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” A few months
before, the Commission of Justice and Peace that Father Giraldo heads had published
a report documenting atrocities in the first part of 1988, including over 3,000
politicallymotivated killings, 273 in “social cleansing” campaigns. Political
killings averaged eight a day, with seven people murdered in their homes or in
the street and one “disappeared.” Citing this report, the Washington Office on
Latin America (WOLA) added that “the vast majority of those who have
disappeared in recent years are grassroots organizers, peasant or union
leaders, leftist politicians, human rights workers and other activists,” over
1500 by the time of the State Department’s praise for Colombia’s democracy and
its respect for human rights. During the 1988 electoral campaigns, 19 of 87
mayoral candidates of the sole independent political party, the UP were
assassinated, along with over 100 of its other candidates. The Central
Organization of Workers, a coalition of trade unions formed in 1986, had by
then lost over 230 members, most of them found dead after brutal torture.
But the “democratic form of government” emerged
without stain, and with no “consistent pattern of gross violations” of human
rights.
By the time of the State Department’s report, the
practices it found praiseworthy were being more efficiently implemented.
Political killings in 1988 and 1989 rose to 11 a day, the Colombian branch of
the Andean Commission of Jurists reported. From 1988 through early 1992, 9,500
people were assassinated for political reasons along with 830 disappearances
and 313 massacres (between 1988 and 1990) of peasants and poor people.
Throughout these years, as usual, the primary victims
of state terror were peasants. In 1988, grassroots organizations in one
southern department reported a “campaign of total annihilation and scorched
earth, Vietnam-style,” conducted by the military forces “in a most criminal
manner, with assassinations of men, women, elderly and children. Homes and
crops are burned, obligating the peasants to leave their lands.” Also in 1988
the government of Colombia established a new judicial regime that called for
“total war against the internal enemy.” It authorized “maximal criminalization
of the political and social opposition,” a European-Latin American Inquiry
reported in Brussels, reviewing “the consolidation of state terror in
Colombia.”
As the State Department report appeared a year after
these events, the Colombian Minister of Defense again articulated the doctrine
of “total war” by state power “in the political, economic, and social arenas.”
Guerrillas were the official targets, but as a high military official had observed
in 1987, their organizations were of minor importance: “the real danger,” he
explained, is “what the insurgents have called the political and psychological
war,” the efforts “to control the popular elements” and “to manipulate the masses.”
The subversives” hope to influence unions, universities, media, and so on, and the
government must counter this “war” with its own “total war in the political,
economic, and social arenas.” Reviewing doctrine and practice, the Brussels
study concludes realistically that the “internal enemy” of the state terrorist
apparatus extends to “labor organizations, popular movements, indigenous
organizations, oppositional political parties, peasant movements, intellectual
sectors, religious currents, youth and student groups, neighborhood
organizations,” indeed any group that must be secured against undesirable
influences. “Every individual who in one or another manner supports the goals
of the enemy must be considered a traitor and treated in that manner,” a
Colombian military manual prescribes.
The manual dates from 1963. At that time, violence in
Colombia was coming to be “exacerbated by external factors,” the president of
the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights, former Minister of Foreign
Affairs Alfredo Vásquez Carrizosa, wrote some years later, reviewing the
outcome. “During the Kennedy administration,” he continues, Washington “took
great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades,
accepting the new strategy of the death squads.” These initiatives “ushered in
what is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine,...not defense
against an external enemy, but a way to make the military establishment the
masters of the game...[with] the right to combat the internal enemy, as set
forth in the Brazilian doctrine, the Argentine doctrine, the Uruguayan
doctrine, and the Colombian doctrine: it is the right to fight and to
exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not
supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to be communist
extremists.”
The “Dirty War” escalated in the early 1980s—not only
in Colombia—as the Reagan administration extended these programs throughout the
region, leaving it devastated, strewn with hundreds of thousands of corpses
tortured and mutilated people who might otherwise have been insufficiently
supportive of the establishment, perhaps even influenced by “subversives.”
North Americans should never allow themselves to f o
rget the origins of “the Brazilian doctrine, the A rgentine doctrine, the
Uruguayan doctrine, the Colombian doctrine,” and others like them. They were
crafted right, then adapted by students trained and equipped right here. The
basic guidelines are spelled out in U.S. manuals of counterinsurgency and “low
intensity conflict.” These are euphemisms, technical terms for state terror, a
fact well known in Latin America. When Archbishop Oscar Romero wrote to
President Carter in 1980 shortly before his assassination, vainly pleading with
him to end U.S. support for the state terrorist, he informed the rector of the
Jesuit University, Father Ellacuría, that he was prompted “by the new concept
of special warfare, which consists in murderously eliminating every endeavor of
the popular organizations under the allegation of Communism or terrorism....”
So Father Ellacuría reported shortly before he was assassinated by the same
hands a decade later; the events framed the murderous decade with symbolism as
gruesome as it was appropriate.
The agents of state terror are the beneficiaries of
U.S. training designed to ensure that they have an “understanding of, and
orientation toward, U.S. objectives,” Defense Secretary Robert McNamera
informed National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy in 1965. This is a matter of
particular importance “in the Latin American cultural environment,” where it is
recognized that the military must be pre p a red to “remove government leaders
f rom office, whenever, in the judgment of the military, the conduct of these
leaders is injurious to the welfare of the nation.” It is the right of the
military and those who provide them with the proper orientation who are
entitled to determine the welfare of the nation, not the beasts of burden
toiling and suffering and expiring in their own lands.
When the State Department announced new arms
shipments as a reward for Colombia’s achievements in human rights and
democracy, it surely had access to the record of atrocities that had been
compiled by the leading international and Colombian human rights organizations.
It was also fully aware of the U.S. role in establishing and maintaining the
regime of terror and oppression. The example is, unfortunately, typical of a
pattern that hardly varies, as can be readily verified.
As the “Dirty War” of the 1980s took its ever more
grisly toll, U.S. participation increased. From 1984 through 1992, 6,844
Colombian soldiers were trained under the U.S. international Military Education
and Training Program. Over 2,000 Colombian officers were trained from 1990 to
1992, as “violence reached unprecedented levels” during the presidency of César
Gaviria, WOLA reported, confirming conclusions of international human rights monitors.
President Gaviria was a particular favorite of
Washington, so admired that the Clinton administration imposed him as
Secretary-General of the Organization of American States in a power play that
aroused much resentment. “He has been very forward looking in building
democratic institutions in a country where it was sometimes dangerous to do
so,” the U.S. re p resentative to the OAS explained—not inquiring into the
reasons for the “dangers,” however. The training program for Colombian o
fficers is the largest in the hemisphere, and U.S. military aid to Colombia now
amounts to about half the total for the entire hemisphere. It has increased
under Clinton, Human Rights Watch reports, adding that he planned to turn to
emergency overdrawing facilities when the Pentagon did not suffice for still
further increases .
The official cover story for the participation in
crime is the war “against the guerrillas and narcotrafficking operations.” In
its 1989 announcement of new arms sales, the State Department could rely on its
human rights reports, which attributed virtually all violence to the guerrillas
and narcotraffickers. Hence the U.S. is “justified” in providing military equipment
and training for the mass murderers and torturers. A month later, George Bush announced
the largest shipment of arms ever authorized under the emergency provisions of
the Foreign Assistance Act. The arms were not sent to the National Police,
which is responsible for almost all counter-narcotic operations, but to the army.
The helicopters and jet planes are useless for the drug war, as was pointed out
at once, but not for other purposes. Human rights groups soon reported bombing
of villages and other atrocities. It is also impossible to imagine that
Washington is not aware that the security forces it is maintaining are closely
linked to the narcotrafficking operations, and that exactly as their leaders
frankly say, the target is the “internal enemy” that might support or be
influenced by “subversives” in some way.
A January 1994 conference on state terror organized
by Jesuits in San Salvador observed that “it is important to explore...what
weight the culture of terror has had in domesticating the expectations of the
majority vis-a-vis alternatives diff e rent to those of the powerful.” That is
the crucial point, wherever such methods are used to subdue the “internal
enemy.” Israeli physician Ruchama Marton, who has been at the fore f ront of
investigation of the use of torture by the security forces of her own country, points
out that while confessions obtained by torture are of course meaningless, the
real purpose is not confession. Rather, it is silence, “silence induced by
fear.” “Fear is contagious,” she continues, “and spreads to the other members
of the oppressed group, to silence and paralyze them. To impose silence through
violence is torture’s real purpose, in the most profound and fundamental sense.”
The same is true of all other aspects of the doctrines that have been devised
and implemented with our guidance and support under a series of fraudulent
guises.
To impose silence on the internal enemy is necessary
in the “democra-tatorships” that U.S. policy has sought to impose on its
domains ever since it “assumed, out of selfinterest, responsibility for the
welfare of the world capitalist system,” in the words of diplomatic Gerald
Haines, senior historian of the CIA, discussing the U.S.takeover of Brazil in
1945—and indeed before, with important echoes at home as well. It is particularly
important to impose silence in the region with the highest inequality in the world,
thanks in no small measure to policies of the superpower that largely controls
it. It is necessary to impose silence and spread fear in countries like
Colombia, where the top three percent of the landed elite own over 70% of
arable land while 57% of the poorest farmers subsist on under 3%—a country
where 40% of the population live in “absolute poverty,” unable to satisfy basic
subsistence needs according to an official government report in 1986, and 18%
live in “absolute misery,” unable to meet nutritional needs. The Colombian
Institute of Family Welfare estimates that four and a half million children under
14 are hungry, half the country’s children. Recall that we are speaking of a
country of enormous resources and potential. It has “one of the healthiest and
most flourishing economies in Latin America,” Latin Americanist John Martz
writes in Current History, lauding this triumph of capitalism in a society with
“democratic structures” which, “notwithstanding inevitable flaws, are among the
most solid on the continent,” a model of “well-established political
stability”—conclusions that are not inaccurate, if not quite in the sense he
seeks to convey.
The effects of U.S. arms and military training are
not confined to Colombia. The record of horrors is all too full. In the Jesuit
journal America, Rev. Daniel Santiago, a priest working in El Salvador,
reported in 1990 the story of a peasant woman who returned home one day to find
her mother, sister, and three children sitting around a table, the decapitated
head of each person placed on the table in front of the body, the hands arranged
on top “as if each body was stroking its own head.” The assassins, from the Salvadoran
National Guard, had found it hard to keep the head of an 18-month-old baby in
place, so they nailed the hands to it. A large plastic bowl filled with blood
stood in the center of the table. Two years earlier, the Salvadoran human
rights group that continued to function despite the assassination of its
founders and directors reported that 13 bodies had been found in the preceding
two weeks, most showing signs of torture, including two women who had been
hanged from a tree by their hair, their breasts cut off and their faces painted
red. The discoveries were familiar, but the timing is significant, just as Washington
was successfully completing the cynical exercise of exempting its murderous clients
from the terms of the Central America peace accords that called for “justice, freedom
and democracy,” “respect for human rights,” and guarantees for “the endless inviolability
of all forms of life and liberty.” The record is endless, and endlessly shocking.
Such macabre scenes, which rarely reached the
mainstream in the United States, are designed for intimidation. Father Santiago
writes that “People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador—they are
decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the
landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police;
their severed genitalia are stuffed in their mouths. Salvadoran women are not
just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and
used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged
over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones while parents are
forced to watch.” “The aesthetics of terror in El Salvador is religious.” The
intention is to ensure that the individual is totally subordinated to the
interests of the Fatherland, which is why the death squads are sometimes called
the “Army of National Salvation” by the governing ARENA party.
The same is true in neighboring Guatemala. In the
traditional “culture of fear,” Latin American scholar Piero Gleijeses writes,
peace and order were guaranteed by ferocious repression, and its contemporary
counterpart follows the same course: “Just as the Indian was branded a savage
beast to justify his exploitation, so those who sought social guerrillas, or
terrorists, or drug dealers, or whatever the current term of art may be. The fundamental
reason, however, is always the same: the savage beast may fall under the influence
of “subversives” who challenge the regime of injustice, oppression and terror that
must continue to serve the interests of foreign investors and domestic
privilege.
Throughout these grim years, nothing has been more
inspiring than the courage and dedication of those who have sought to expose
and overcome the culture of fear in their suffering countries. They have left
martyrs, whose voices have been silenced by the powerful—yet another crime. But
they continue to struggle on. Father Giraldo’s remarkable work and eloquent
words should not only inspire us, but also impel us to act to bring these
terrors to an end, as we can. His testimony here contains an “urgent appeal.”
It should be answered, but it does not go far enough. Our responsibilities
extend well beyond. The fate of Colombians and many others hinges on our
willingness and ability to recognize and meet them.
Noam Chomsky
Cambridge, MA
May 1995
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