Misrepresentation of the Colombian Conflict
By Matt PeppeOctober 09, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - A week and a half ago
news emerged from Havana that the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia) and the Colombian government had reached a framework
for a final
peace agreement to be signed within six months. This was hailed
as a breakthrough in the half-century-old conflict and an
opportunity to bring peace to the people of Colombia. But by
adopting the government's narrative, mainstream media have failed to
recognize the primary cause of the violence and the inevitability
that it will continue in the future.
The decades-long policy of the Colombian government has been a
national security strategy of counterinsurgency, developed in the
late 1950s under the sponsorship of the US military. The goal of the
US government was to maintain a business-friendly political system
that would implement economic policies amenable to multinational
corporations and foreign capital. Resistance to such policies was
deemed subversion, and people who sympathized with such resistance
were branded as internal enemies to be eliminated or neutralized by
military means.
The narrative of the national security doctrine holds that if the
insurgent threat is eliminated, then peace will be restored. The
implicit assumption is that the FARC rebels have always been the
side standing in the way of peace. According to this interpretation,
when the FARC initiated their military operations the state was
acting for the benefit of the nation as a whole by organizing a
counter response.
But this narrative is historically inaccurate. The Colombian
conflict is not a battle of society at large against a group of
guerillas, but a battle of a small group of elites controlling the
state apparatus against the majority of the population.
"As in many other Latin American countries, we can find the seeds of
present-day social inequality and strife in the concentration of
Colombia's land and resources under the control of a tiny minority,
matched by the progressive dispossession of the majority of people,
which originated with colonialism in the sixteenth century,"
explains Jasmin Hristov in her book
Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia. [1]
After the FARC developed as the armed wing of the Communist Party in
Colombia, the counterinsurgency doctrine - developed by the US
military and codified in manuals distributed as early as the 1960s -
taught the US's Colombian counterparts to view any advocacy for
social justice or democratic reform as a form of Communist
insurgency. In addition to armed rebels, clergy, academics, labor
leaders, human rights workers, and other members of civil society
became potential insurgent targets.
To further extend their reach into Colombian society, the government
legally authorized paramilitarism in 1965 with Plan Lazlo to form
"civilian defense forces" armed and incorporated into the Colombian
military system. [2] These forces serve the government's goal of
preserving the status quo by carrying out their dirty work through
the use of death squads, assassinations, torture, intimidation and
disappearances while providing cover and the appearance of distance
from the state itself.
The Colombian conflict cannot be understood without recognizing the
true nature of the actors involved and the interests they represent.
"The paramilitary has never been, and is even less so now, a third
actor (the state and the guerillas being the other two), as
portrayed in mainstream security discourses," writes Hristov. [3]
Writing in the
New York Times after the peace agreement was announced, Ernesto
Londoño declared the "three-way fight among guerilla factions,
government forces and right-wing paramilitary bands that often acted
as proxies for the state had killed more than 220,000 people and
displaced an estimated 5.7 million."
Dan Kovalik, Professor of International Human Rights at the
University of Pittsburgh School of Law, disputes the notion that
paramilitaries merely occasionally serve as proxies: “It is
impossible to talk about the paramilitaries as separate from the
Colombian state, for the Colombian state helped create the
paramilitaries, and human rights groups have concluded year after
year that the state has provided them with weapons, logistical
support and has carried out joint operations with them, Even federal
courts confronted with this questions under the Alien Tort Claims
Act have concluded that the paramilitaries are sufficiently
integrated with the state that their misdeeds constitute state
action."
Aside from inaccurately describing the fighting, Londoño's statement
uses statistics about the cumulative violence without describing who
holds responsibility for the deaths and displacements. Later in his
editorial, Londoño implicitly blames the FARC for the majority of
the violence: "Dozens of victims traveled to Havana to speak about
abuses they endured at the hands of the guerilla leaders. Some
implicated government forces in brutal acts... The special war
tribunals the government intends to start adjudicating crimes will
be dismissed as kangaroo courts by those who would have favored a
military defeat of the FARC."
If one accepts the national security narrative that most violence by
the government amounts to collateral damage as a result of reaction
to insurgent aggression, then guerillas would be responsible for the
majority of deaths and injuries. But this is hardly the case.
Kovalik notes that "human rights groups have consistently concluded
that the Colombian state and its paramilitary allies commit the
lion’s share of the human rights violations in that country - in the
worst years, at least 80% of the abuses can be attributed to these
forces.”
US Government Intervention and Plan Colombia
Londoño also credits US policy with providing the
impetus to achieving peace: "Washington's forceful intervention
in the war, an intervention that began in the late 1990s,
enabled the Colombian government to weaken the FARC and
ultimately set the stage for peace negotiations."
Washington's counterinsurgency policy is seen not
only as an instrument for peace, but as the primary factor
enabling its achievement. This is stunning historical
revisionism that portrays the instigator and sponsor of massive
violence that has lasted decades as an honest broker for ending
this violence.
In reality, Washington's intervention began 40
years earlier than Londoño claims, and it created the war that
has raged ever since. By any objective measure, US policy in
Colombia has been an abject failure. Under US direction, funding
and training, the Colombian state has had one of the
worst human rights records in the hemisphere. Many human
rights organizations attest to this, and have demanded an end to
US military aid to Colombia.
"Year after year US policy has ignored the
evidence and the cries of the United Nations, Colombian and
international non-governmental organizations and the people of
Colombia. Plan Colombia is a failure in every respect and human
rights in Colombia will not improve until there is a fundamental
shift in US foreign policy," writes
Amnesty International USA.
A
Human Rights Watch report declared that: “all international
security assistance should be conditioned on explicit actions by
the Colombian Government to sever links, at all levels, between
the Colombian military and paramilitary groups. Abuses directly
attributed to members of the Colombian military have decreased
in recent years, but over the same period the number and scale
of abuses attributed to paramilitary groups operating with the
military’s acquiescence or open support have skyrocketed.”
Bogotá professor and historian
Renán Vega Cantor, in a study of U.S. involvement in
Colombia, writes that: "State terrorism that has been perpetual
in Colombia since the end of the 1940s feeds off the military
support and financing of the United States, as much as the
interests of the dominant Creole classes, to preserve their
wealth and power and deny the fulfillment of elemental economic
and social reforms that are redistributive."
What the New York Times and the mainstream media
miss in their analysis is that the current neoliberal Colombian
sociopolitical system necessitates the continuance of violence
to accommodate capital.
"The guerilla was not the cause of the Colombian
conflict but rather one of its symptoms, and simultaneously
became a contributing factor in the sense that its very
existence has provided the ideological substance for the pretext
and justification behind state-sanctioned violence and
militarization, Thus unfortunately the presence of the guerilla
has been used by the powerful to legitimate the onslaught on
social forces that challenge the power of the dominant classes,"
writes Hristov in her latest book,
Paramilitarism and Neoliberalism: Violent Systems of Capital
Accumulation in Colombia and Beyond. [4]
Hristov says that in order for the government to
meet FARC's demands, they would have to invest in social
programs at the expense of the military-security apparatus
currently in place. But since these systems serve the neoliberal
economic restructuring that funnels land and resources from the
masses to the tiny elite minority, it would be naive to assume
this will happen.
"Even in a post-FARC era the state would always
have a pretext, such as BACRIM [criminal bands with roots in
nominally disarmed paramilitary groups] or the existence of
other guerilla groups, to maintain its high level of
militarization," Hristov writes. [5]
The portrayal of the Colombian conflict in the
New York Times and other mainstream media replicates state
propaganda, in the form of the national security doctrine, while
failing to account for the inherent violence of the economic
system in Colombia that has driven the perpetual militarism and
coercion in the country.
While any agreement offering the prospect of
decreased bloodshed is encouraging, the fact that the Colombian
state continues to abide by the Washington Consensus and its
neoliberal socioeconomic model sadly signifies that the country
is inevitably headed for continued violence, dispossession, and
suffering by the vast majority of the population.
When the Colombian government and the western
media recognize that Washington intervention exacerbates the
violence, rather than helps minimize it, then possibly Colombia
can begin to extricate itself and pursue a course that will
enable the Colombian people to achieve lasting peace and social
justice. Matt Peppe writes about
politics, U.S. foreign policy and Latin America on his blog.
http://mattpeppe.blogspot.mx/ - You can follow him on
twitter.
https://twitter.com/PeppeMatt
References
[1] Hristov,
Jasmin.
Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia.
Ohio University Press; 1 edition, 2009. Kindle edition.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Hristov, Jasmin. Paramilitarism and Neoliberalism: Violent
Systems of Capital Accumulation in Colombia and Beyond. London:
Pluto Press, 2014. (pg. 153)
[5] Hristov, 2014 (pg. 157)
