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Threat to Regional SecurityMilitary Escalation of United States in Colombia and nearby countriesProceso, No. 1187By Heinz Dieterich Steffan Translated by Mary Ann Tenuto for the Chiapas Support Committee (cezmat@igc.org). 1 August 1999 This Month's News | CSN Home |
In November 1998, the U.S. Congress agreed to triple the security aid for Colombia to $289 million, which converted it into the largest receiver of that class of aid, after Israel and Egypt. It was the tip of the iceberg of U.S. military intervention in a region that goes from Panama to Ecuador, Peru, Guayana and the Caribbean.
Unedited documents of the U.S. government obtained by the author and information published by the North American press reveal: a) for Washington, the Colombia conflict already is a hemispheric problem; b) the direct military intervention of Washington already is comparable to that of El Salvador and Nicaragua in 1983-1984; and c) that the type of war planned by Washington would be equal to that utilized in Kosovo. Special Forces in Theaters of Combat The first information about Washington's direct military intervention in Colombia was revealed by the Washington Post, May 25 1998. It said that the U.S. military participates not only in tasks of training and intelligence, but at the tactical and strategy level in war operations against the guerillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
The training realized by Army special forces--the majority from Fort Bragg, North Carolina--and U.S. Navy SEALS involves annually 100 specialists in counterinsurgency [read: dirty war] against popular movements.
At all times, revealed the Washington Post, there are around 200 military personnel from Washington in Colombia, 60 of whom are stationed in three radar observation posts inside of Colombia; the rest participate in a direct or indirect manner in repression against the FARC and the ELN.
The intensity of cooperation between the U.S. government and the Colombian Army under the program, JCET, is revealed in the following Pentagon statistics: in fiscal year 1996, 10 training exercises were realized with 114 U.S. military personnel involved and 651 Colombians, and in fiscal year 1997, three exercises with 143 U.S. military personnel.
Data from the U.S. South Command (SouthCom) indicate, nevertheless, that Washington's intervention was even greater than what the Pentagon admitted: during 1996 there were 28 Special Forces operations; in 1997 28 exercises were realized with 319 U.S. military personnel, and for 1998 they were planning 24 exercises, with 274 special troops.
A week after the Washington Post report, the New York Times gave more in-depth information announcing in its June 2 edition that the Clinton government was considering, among other measures: the increase of military training of the armed forces of Colombia, the sending of more sophisticated arms of war, and the installation of an intelligence center of high technology, operated by the U.S. military.
The Southern Command (SouthCom) with its headquarters in Miami and whose commander in chief is General Charles E. Wilhelm, is a key force in this chess game of pacification Central- American style that seeks to repeat itself in the northern region of South America.
For Wilhelm, military intervention in Colombia is not a short-term issue, but a marriage for life. According to the general, the threat is intensified for the Colombian government and it was observed that it is undermining governability at the popular level. To exorcise the threat, this general is himself becoming the de facto commander in chief of the Colombian Armed Forces (FAC). When in January the nominal leader of the FAC, General Manuel J. Bonett, presented his strategic plan for attacking the guerillas, Wilhelm and his officials revised it and "picked it to pieces," in the words of the New York Times. Since then, Wilhelm is restructuring the FAC and its training; the U.S. instructors graduate their "students" by means of a plan of attack against the guerillas that the "students" carry out.
Growing sales of military equipment and flagrant human rights violations complement the habitual dirty war scene. From 1995 to 1997, Washington's "anti-drug" aid increased from $28.8 to around $96 million--more than 300% in two years. In the same period, the sales of military equipment went up from $21.9 to 475 million.
The chief of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), General Barry McCaffrey, is the second architect of intervention in the region. McCaffrey has a double mission: a) to construct, together with Wilhelm, the logistics of intervention; and b) to create with the State Department the discourse to justify the intervention.
Last July 26, McCaffrey proclaimed in Bogata the official apology for Washington's intervention. "240,000 police and military personnel and 37 million people are confronted by the savage attacks of 25 thousand internal enemies, financed by hundreds of millions of dollars of drug money.
This discourse complemented his argument pronounced the day before, in the sense that the guerillas are a threat to Panamanian citizens, as well as to the border populations of Venezuela, Ecuador and Brazil. Significantly, this declaration of McCaffrey was produced one day after President Andres Pastrana said that Colombia is not nor will never be a threat to the security of the region. Meanwhile, the State Department participated in another virulent verbal attack against the guerillas: "The cynical manipulation which the FARC makes of the peace process ought to cease immediately," said James Rubin, the spokesperson for Madeleine Albright,in Washington.
For the arms war, not for propaganda purposes, on July 16 McCaffrey asked for emergency aid of one thousand million dollars ($1,000,000,000!) for the government of Pastrana, arguing that he is in a situation of pre-crisis. The money would serve to buy helicopters, interception planes and radar equipment; $30,000,000 would be to improve the collection and analysis of information obtained from satellites, radar and electronic intelligence; $200 million would be for the improvement of the U.S. interception efforts by air and sea.
The Colombian Minister of Defense, Luis Fernando Ramirez, and the commander of Military Forces, General Fernendo Tapias, who accompanied McCaffrey in Washington, solicited also on loan some of the equipment used by the U.S. Army's SouthCom at its Howard Base in the Panama Canal Zone, according to the New York Times of July 17.
The July 23 fall of the U.S. military spy plane DCH-7 (or RC-7) in southern Colombia (Putumayo), provided new data about the intervention. Just one month before, a study by an arm of the U.S. Congress, the Government Accounting Office (GAO), had discovered that the United States has been providing military intelligence about guerilla activities to the Colombian armed forces since last March.
July 15, General Charles Wilhelm revealed on a discourse in the sadly celebrated School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, that during the last guerilla offensive in the middle of July, the military forces of the United States and Colombia had been in constant communication, thus indirectly confirming that the guerilla advance on Bogata was stopped by the Colombian Air Force, directed by U.S. officials and military intelligence.
The data revealed by the crash of the military plane permit understanding the hemispheric character of the intervention. According to a source in Washington, consulted by the Colombian newspaper El Espectador (The Spectator), the massive espionage over the Colombian guerillas began two months ago with the involvement of the Special Operations Air Regiment of the U.S. Army and around 250 technicians that labor in Colombia.
With electronic and high tech infrared equipment, the DCH-7 planes--which also were used in Kosovo--detect infrared images of the guerillas in the forest, on one hand, and intercept, on the other, all the FARC's radio communications: those between commanders, by means of the Internet, and the radiophonic programs for the Colombian population.
The plane, crewed by five U.S. military personnel and two Colombians, requires the accompaniment of another military reconnaissance plane known as an EP-3, for the purpose of being able to locate the emission area of the signal intercepted. And effectively, at the moment the DCH-7 disappeared, an EP-3 plane was at the Coca Ecuadorian Air Base, near the site of the accident. Significantly, the rescue operations are coordinated from the Pentagon and from the Francisco Orellano Base of the Ecuadorian Army.
The policy of intervention against Colombia can only be understood in a regional context. The U.S. military withdrawal from the Panama CanalZone at the end of this year; the policy of national sovereignty of the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez and the popular advance in Colombia put in danger--from the point of view of Washington--their whole system of domination in that geostrategic and oil-producing region.
Its response to that danger is threefold: a) control Panama by means of an open threat of occupation; b) create the logistics to neutralize or, in their case, destroy the FARC and the ELN in Colombia; and c) after having achieved the pacification of Colombia, restore Venezuela to its condition of a traditional submissive Latin American state.
As for Panama, the military threat has already been formulated. It was a month ago, when Commander Charles Wilhelm declared publicly that Panama lacks the military capacity to defend itself against the Colombian guerrilla, a fact for which the government of Bill Clinton reserves the right to intervene unilaterally in the country if he sees danger to the security of the canal.
April 1, 1999, the Ecuadorian government of President Muhuad ceded logistics facilities at the Manta Air Base to the U.S. Air Force. The Ecuadorian motives for accepting such an arrangement were explained in a confidential report last May about the concession of logistics facilities to the U.S. Air Force at Manta for the combat of illicit international drug trafficking in the following manner: a) the U.S. need to substitute air operations that it was conducting until May 1, 1999, from Howard Base in Panama; b) the beneficial tariffs that Ecuador receives from Washington for the combat of drug trafficking; and c) the fact that a negative could have been interpreted by the United States and other developed countries as a lack of political will on the part of Ecuador to support the international struggle against drug trafficking.
The report also established that Ecuador was selected by Washington because of its strategic location and because of the security it offers.
The agreement between both governments, in effect beginning April 1, points out that the U.S. government will assign to the air base a restricted number of military and civilian personnel in charge of coordinating and facilitating the operation of the airplanes. The personnel to crew the airplanes will be 200 people who will rotate for limited periods between Ecuador and the United States.
The U.S. Air Force will employ at Manta eight airplanes with a maximum of 140 runs per month for the completion of their missions relative to reconnaissance, maritime patrol communications intelligence, image signals, air detection, early warning vigilance and re-supplying.
North American personnel will be in charge of the security of the airplanes...a U.S. government air traffic controller will be authorized to coordinate with Ecuadorian personnel and to deliver instructions from the control tower to the airplanes.
The agreement will last until September 30, 1999, but the United States hopes to be granted logistics facilities at that same base for a period between 8 to 10 years, with a possible investment of $30-40 million.
General Charles Wilhelm is a frequent guest at this military base, which will be the center of U.S. operations against the Colombian guerillas. He arrived July 5 for an inspection visit, which was repeated 10 days later. In light of the recent events in Colombia, his hurry is understandable.
April 13, 1999, a similar agreement was concretized between the Foreign Relations Minister of the Low Countries, J.J. van Aartsen, and the U.S. Ambassador to The Hague, Cynthia P. Schneider, effective for one year, but with indications toward a more definite agreement to guarantee a presence and continuous U.S. cooperation in the Dutch Antilles and Aruba for a more extensive period.
Holland facilitates access as much by land as by air and the use of certain airports to personnel of the U.S. Armed Forces and civilian governmental personnel, for carrying out missions of detection and monitoring against drug trafficking and, when it may arise, interdiction missions.
During their service, the U.S. personnel will enjoy immunity from penal, civil and administrative jurisdiction in the Kingdom of the Low Countries; similarly, they are exempt from visa requirements and can carry arms inside determined zones; vehicles that are the property of the U.S. Armed Forces need not be registered or licensed by the authorities of the host country.
Different from Ecuador and Holland, the Venezuelan government has refused to authorize foreign military bases in its country. Inclusively, last May, it denied a joint petition from Washington and The Hague regarding permission for flyovers of planes based on the islands of Aruba and Curazao in anti-narcotics operations. The Venezuelan president said he was "completely sure that the United States and Holland are going to understand that we are a capable sovereign country and that we have our own defense mechanisms ... What is left for the United States to say is thank you very much and go away to another side to see how to solve the problem" (The Telegraph, Guayaquil, June 26, 1999).
Nevertheless, after receiving a U.S. government mission headed by Peter Romero, Undersecretary of State for Latin-American issues, Venezuela had to accept July 16 that a third radar station would be installed in the border village near Colombia, San Fernando Atabapo, some 700 kilometers south of Caracas.
Two other radar stations are located to the north, on theParaguana Peninsula and Margarita Island. In the negotiations to install them, it had been achieved, according to a member of the negotiating committee, that the intelligence information sent to Howard Base in Panama, might be shared in real time with the Venezuelan Air Force. For the new base at Atabapo,there is no similar information.
The government of President Alberto Fujimori does not have problems because of its participation in the military circle of Colombia. Already last February, Fujimori said to President Pastrana that it was wrong to negotiate with the guerillas, which he considered a danger to the region. And, certainly, the recent peace between Peru and Ecuador over both country's the border problem in the Amazon takes on a different tone in light of the Colombian conflict.
According to Ecuadorian political sources, a large part of Ecuadoran troops stationed on the Peruvian border were displaced, after the peace treaty, towards the Colombian border. And the same is true for Peruvian troops. The cited report affirms that Peru is considering conceding a military base in Iquitos or Chiclayo to the United States. According to the Lima analyst Oscar Ugarteche, the balance leaned toward Iquitos, where the U.S. military base from the Valley of Huallaga in Central Peru would have been moved.
In Guyana, the United States achieved renting a special base and it is supposed that Washington is also negotiating a military base with the government of Costa Rica. If the mentioned air bases are tied, it remains clear that there already exists a growing network of air intelligence that is complemented by satellite intelligence and that it creates the military infrastructure for air intervention and, eventually, an Inter-American land force.
McCaffrey already spoke of the necessity of having an international observation of drug traffic force in Putumayo, and two important mediasources in Argentina revealed last week that there are U.S. intentions to know the Argentine position in relation to possible military intervention in Colombia. The presidential candidate of the Peronists, Eduardo Duhalde, commented from Rome that what happens in Colombia is tied to the narco-guerilla, and because such a tense situation exists, he would have to analyze the theme of intervention (La Jornada, 7/24/99). He would deal with a position congruent enough with the attempts of President Menem to convert Argentina into a member of NATO!
The above data are evidence that U.S. military intervention in Colombia already is comparable to its level of intervention against the Farbundo Marto Front of National Liberation (FMLN) in El Salvador in 1883-1984, against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the same period, andin Vietnam in 1963. The interventionist logic also follows this historic pattern: a) on-site training of native troops by military advisors; b) delivery of tactical and strategic intelligence to those troops; c) the tactical conducting of war operations; d) modernization and strategic reorganization of the native armed forces, particularly the Air Force; and e) financing and worldwide propaganda coverage.
Finally, the U.S. policy of pacification in the region will have a foreseeable evolution. Just as happened in the negotiations of Rambouillet over Kosovo, Washington will present the conditions for peace acceptableto its interests. If the FARC and the ELN refuse to ratify them, they will be bombed until conforming themselves with the Pax Americana, just as happened with Milosevich in Serbia and with the FMLN in El Salvador.
© 1999 Proceso