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Plan Colombia Aid and the Paramilitaries

These make very interesting reading!

By Sean Donahue,

http://www.statecraft.org/chapter9.html (Read for Background)

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2005/5/6/1636/09285 (Complete Article)

In January of 2001, in a meeting at the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, one of the top aides to then-U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson ridiculed the idea that any of the weapons or equipment given to the Colombian military as part of Plan Colombia could wind up in the hands of the right wing paramilitaries of the AUC.
Events this week reveal the deceitfulness or naïveté of her comments, and reflect a long-standing pattern of U.S. military collaboration with Colombian paramilitaries going back to the 1960’s.

As Dan Feder reported in these pages today, and The New York Times reported yesterday, earlier this week, Colombian authorities arrested Allan Tanquary and Jesus Hernandez, with either 32,000 or 40,000 rounds of ammunition. According to Juan Forero of the Times:

“Authorities said the two had been in contact with a former Colombian Police Sgt. Will Gabriel Aguilar, who has been linked to paramilitary groups. Aguilar, another retired policeman and two other Colombians were also arrested, police said. The ammunition had been sent to Colombia by the United States under its Plan Colombia aid program.”
The two are now in U.S. custody and are being flown back to the United States.

While this is the first documented case of weapons supplied for Plan Colombia apparently being funneled directly to the paramilitaries, it certainly is not the first case in which U.S. aid has been implicated in paramilitary activity. A short and by no means exhaustive catalog of such cases follows:

-- In February of 1962, General William Yarborough led a U.S. Special Forces delegation to Colombia, which recommended the formation of armed paramilitary groups to counter “subversion.” His report suggested:

“[A] Concerted country team effort should be made now to select civilian and military personnel for clandestine training in resistance operations in case they are needed later. This should be done with a view toward development of a civil and military structure for exploitation in the event the Colombian internal security system deteriorates further. This structure should be used to pressure toward reforms known to be needed, perform counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions and as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents. It should be backed by the United States.”

By Patrick on May 7, 2005, 19:07 in Politics & the war.

juancegomez says on May 7, 2005, 19:48:

The same scaremongering, as always is the case... And equipment from Central America, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, U.S., Israel, the Middle East, Colombia itself and other countries ends up in the hands of all the armed groups involved from time to time, in different quantities. That is completely inevitable.

There is absolutely no reason yet, however, to accuse the U.S. in 2004 of orchestrating any organized effort at giving these weapons to the AUC or any other groups. These are known to be the actions, at least at the moment, of individuals and illegal dealers, not the result of official government policies. There is nowhere near enough solid and current evidence for that (notice the words, *solid* and *current*). I'd like to see the evidence of the U.S. having such plans and directives currently.

If we are going to bring in 1960's information into the situation, then we'd have to do so correctly and fully, because it's a completely different context.

That set of recommedations or variants of it were made to many other countries in the region with communist insurgencies, real or potential, after the developments in 1960's Cuba, during the early Cold War. Nothing specific to Colombia in itself.

Even in the 1980s and 1990s, such strategies or derivatives of them were still followed successfully in places such as Peru, where Sendero Luminoso was almost defeated and is practically impotent today.

As for later instances, once again, I'd like to see real concrete proof that they are the result of current U.S. policy and not the actions of individuals.

A sum of individuals and of events does not equal solid proof of an entire policy, even less so if these individuals are the minority within their respective groups, which they are as far as is known.

But if that were the case (ie: "that does equal proof of an entire policy"), then I could make a thousand wild and exaggerated statements about practically any criminal behavior in the world and its associated governments and nationalities, by that same flawed logic that relies only on circumstance and not on real proof.

Circumstance can be useful, however, it is insufficient in order to make the absolute statements of fact that people are making about all this. There is no direct causal relationship, and in fact many alternative explanations remain valid, including that of these events being the actions of individuals.

So, if you will, do you have the kind of evidence that I'm looking for handy? If not, then...the same old exaggerated and insufficiently proven scaremongering all over again.

(Needless to say, much of this goes both for this case and for the alleged probability of the FARC getting weapons from Venezuelan arms purchases...I don't blame the entire government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela as purposedly delivering weapons to the FARC, because at this moment all the evidence points to the actions of individuals only, even if they may have a rank or a political post)

0 funny, 0 helpful.