Bill Clinton has just made one of the worst decisions of his Presidency: On Tuesday, his Administration announced a massive increase in military aid to Colombia.
Unbeknownst to most Americans, Clinton is dragging the United States into a bloody civil war in Latin America that has been raging now for almost four decades, with tens of thousands killed.
Clinton is backing the Colombian military, but there are no good guys in this drama.
The Colombian military, which has one of the worst human rights records in the hemisphere, is itself corrupted by the drug trade.
The rightwing paramilitary forces, which work closely with the Colombian army, run a big chunk of the drug business themselves. If the U.S. government were serious about fighting the war on drugs, it would campaign against these paramilitaries. Instead, it actually has supported them, as Frank Smyth reported in the June 1998 issue of The Progressive. What's more, the Colombian military has not waged a single campaign against the paramilitaries; instead, they work together. So the war on drug is a ruse. In actuality, it is a war on Colombian rebels.
The main rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, already controls a large section of Colombia. The United States does not want them to take over the whole country because it is strategically located and U.S. multinationals have billions of dollars invested there.
But the Administration knows that it would be a hard sell to the American public to say that the U.S. government is taking sides in a civil war in Latin America. We've been down that road before. So, instead, it hypes the drug war.
And let's be clear: The rebels aren't angels: They finance their operations through the drug trade, and they have committed human rights abuses, as well.
But at it's heart, this conflict has nothing to do with drugs, since all parties are in on the narcotics trade. It has everything to do with who will end up controlling Colombia.
The tragedy of the situation is that for a few fleeting months in late 1998 and 1999, Colombia's president, Andres Pastrana, took some bold steps toward making a peace settlement with the guerrillas. He even ceded a sizable amount of territory to the rebels. But then Washington scolded him for daring to do that, the paramilitaries stepped up their brutal assaults, and the guerrillas remained obstinate.
The Colombian people overwhelmingly want peace. Millions of Colombians took to the streets in October to demand an end to the civil war. But this U.S. military aid will only prolong it.
Clinton is sending sixty-two helicopters and an additional $600 million "to train and equip two more counternarcotics battalions," The New York Times reports. But they won't be targeting just any old drug dealers; they will be targeting FARC. The Colombian military--as well as the Clinton Administration--no longer distinguishes between guerrillas and drug dealers. Already, a so-called counternarcotics battalion, trained by U.S. forces, has led assaults on the rebels.
Hey, this is how Reagan bloodied our hands in El Salvador!
Clinton's even rehired some of the characters from the Salvador campaign. Thomas Pickering, for instance, who was U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador in the 1980s, is now Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, and he's gone to Bogotá to lean on Pastrana to take a harder line toward the rebels.
But Clinton doesn't seem to be bothered by the similarities. He's given in to the most belligerent Republicans on this issue, abandoning Democrats like Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Representative Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, who have warned that the United States has no business supporting Colombia's brutal military.
In his last year as President, Clinton had a chance to do the right thing in Colombia. Instead, he is embroiling the United States in another Latin American human rights disaster.