Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781842775479 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2004 |
| Pages: | 168 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.39(d) |
About the Author
Doug Stokes is a lecturer in International Politics at the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth, University of Wales.
Read an Excerpt
America's Other War
Terrorizing Colombia
By Doug Stokes
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2005 Doug StokesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-119-4
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: interpreting US foreign policy in Colombia
During the Cold War the US intervened in more states in Latin America than in any other continent, with US-sponsored counter-insurgency (CI) the primary means of US coercive statecraft. US planners argued that CI support for allied states was designed to contain the influence of the Soviet Union through the destruction of left-wing armed insurgencies that were portrayed as externally sponsored instances of Soviet expansionism. Throughout this period Colombia remained one of the largest recipients of US CI funding and training designed to destroy the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a rebel insurgency movement. The FARC were portrayed as Soviet-backed guerrillas, and as a threat to the pro-US Colombian state. During these years of support, the Colombian military carried out widespread human rights abuses. Although these abuses were not publicly approved, they were considered a necessary evil required to prevent the alleged devastating consequences to US security should a potentially pro-Soviet state come to power in Latin America. George Kennan, the architect of the USA's Cold War grand strategy of containment, explained that in dealing with communism in Latin America the final answer 'may be an unpleasant one' but the USA 'should not hesitate before police repression by the local government'. Kennan considered this repression not only to be strategically necessary but also to be ethically correct, as 'the Communists are essentially traitors'. He continued, it 'is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists'.
Interestingly, with the end of the Cold War the USA has not only continued to fund and train the Colombian military for its fight against the FARC, but has dramatically escalated its support to the extent that Colombia is now the third largest recipient of US military aid in the world. A central question emerges from this account, and it is the puzzle that this book attempts to answer: given the high human costs historically associated with US Cold War support for abusive Latin American militaries, why has US aid to the Colombian military been continued throughout the post-Cold War period? This question is especially pertinent given the justifications employed by the USA during the Cold War era, the USA's publicly declared commitment to post-Cold War democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention to prevent human rights abuses, and the continuing record of gross human rights abuses committed by the Colombian military and their paramilitary allies who are responsible for over 70 per cent of all politically motivated assassinations.
In seeking to explore these issues, this book relates this continuity in US military funding to a wider set of debates within the discipline of International Relations (IR). Specifically, within IR, a discontinuity thesis has emerged that views US post-Cold War objectives within the Third World as significantly different from their earlier Cold War orientation. This book formulates an alternative continuity thesis and argues, in contrast, that in the case of Colombia US objectives and policy are characterized by significant continuity with their earlier Cold War orientation. This interpretive dichotomy between the discontinuity and continuity arguments animates the empirical analysis of US policy in Colombia. In relation to US intervention in Colombia, the discontinuity thesis is deeply rooted within mainstream academia, the international media and the US policy community The switch from the objectives of Cold War containment of communist insurgency using CI to an allegedly new counter-narcotic and counter-terrorist orientation are taken as both the principal indicators of discontinuity in US policy and objectives, and as the primary justification for the continued funding of the Colombian military, albeit for the new post-Cold War battles against drugs and terrorism.
In opposition to the discontinuity thesis, this book constructs a continuity argument and grounds this empirically by showing that the USA is neither targeting the primary drug traffickers nor fighting a war on international terrorism in Colombia. Instead, the USA has continued to fund and train the Colombian military for a CI war against both the Colombian insurgents and progressive sections of Colombian civil society throughout the post-Cold War era. As such, the wars on drugs and terrorism provide a pretext for this continuity of US CI strategy, and US post-Cold War objectives form an overarching continuity with their earlier Cold War policy and objectives. This continuity is due to the fact that US economic and strategic interests in Colombia have remained the same, and the Colombian case grounds a wider critical perspective as to the nature of US foreign and security policy within the new world order.
This book thus refutes the rhetorical claims of US policy-makers and the mainstream discontinuity arguments as to the nature of US intervention in Colombia, while exploring the role that the USA has played in installing, codifying and supporting Colombian state terrorism both during and after the Cold War period. The central argument is that the USA continues to pursue a pervasive strategy of state terrorism in Colombia to protect its economic and political interests in South America. This goes against the vast majority of analyses of US policy in Colombia, which maintain that the USA has been fighting a war on drugs, and now a new 'war on terror' in Colombia, and not war of terror designed to destroy both armed and unarmed social forces. There are three main reasons for this continuity.
First, the USA's war on drugs and the new war on terror are pretexts used to justify the continued funding of the Colombian military so that it can pacify those armed groups and unarmed progressive social forces that potentially threaten a stability geared towards US interests. These interests have remained consistent with the Cold War period. Furthermore, not only is the USA not fighting a war on drugs and on terrorism, but it is actually sponsoring the principal drug-funded terrorists in Colombia through its use of CI warfare.
Second, in the wake of the Gulf War in 1990 and the events of September 11 2001, the USA has sought to diversify its oil purchasing from the Middle East to other sources. Colombia's neighbour, Venezuela, is currently one of the largest oil suppliers to US markets, with Colombia supplying more oil to the USA today than Kuwait did prior to the first Gulf War. US planners have explicitly linked South American regional security to the instability in Colombia and have asserted the importance of US strategic oil acquisition needs in driving US intervention in Colombia. US access to South American oil thus contributes to the continued funding of the Colombian military for CI.
Third, a prevailing CI discourse exists that continues to construct the identity of various elements of civil society such as unions, teachers' organizations, human rights groups and so on as 'subversive'. This book unpacks this discourse using US military manuals and doctrine and relates it to the evolution of US CI warfare during the Cold War and the way it continues to be mapped on to the Colombian situation. The continued existence of these US economic and strategic interests provides the most plausible account of the continuity of post-Cold War US intervention in Colombia alongside the continued existence of the CI discourse which affects the way the war is waged in Colombia.
Colombia occupies the north-western part of South America and shares borders with Panama, Venezuela, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador. It also possesses coasts on both the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea while its three Andean mountain ranges split the country into climatically distinct areas with the Amazon rainforest to the south, vast barren plains to the east and the Caribbean coast to the north. Alongside its geographical diversity Colombia is racially mixed and traces its various ethnicities from its own indigenous peoples, the early Spanish colonizers and the African slaves put to work on its colonial plantations. By the early nineteenth century 50 per cent of Colombia's people were of mixed race. Politically, Colombia prides itself on being one of Latin America's oldest democracies, with the Republic of Colombia established in 1886. Since its inception, however, Colombia has been characterized by extreme class stratification, social exclusion and political violence. Politically these tensions have been refracted through the rivalries of Colombia's two main parties: the Conservatives and Liberals. Both parties have dominated Colombia's political system since their formation in the 1840s with the Conservatives pro-Church, anti-reform and closely aligned with the landholding class while the Liberals have tended to pursue modest social reforms and have aligned with Colombia's commercial sectors. Aside from these differences, however, the desire to resist fundamental change to Colombia's prevailing socio-economic system has tended to unite them with both parties relying upon clientelistic networks to entrench their power at local level. Importantly, both have been united in their opposition to social forces that have sought to reform Colombia's highly unequal economy which has long been characterized by extreme divisions of wealth. Today, for example, Colombia has one of the most unequal divisions in the world. The UN states that 10 per cent of Colombia's rich have a 46.1 per cent share of national income. Conversely, the poorest 10 per cent have 1.1 per cent. Colombia is thus effectively characterized by two economies: one formal and one informal, and it is the vast and precarious informal economy that sustains the livelihoods of the majority of Colombia's urban population.
One of the central bulwarks against economic reformism has been the Colombian military which has long acted to insulate the Colombian political and economic system from popular pressures for reform. This relationship was codified under the National Front arrangement of the 1950s which alternated power between Conservative and Liberal elites, and which effectively continues to this day. It was under the National Front that the Colombian military was given carte blanche to eradicate enclaves of peasant colonizers in Colombia's south left over from a brutal civil war now called simply la violencia ('the violence') that claimed up to 300,000 lives. The colonizers were fleeing the persecution of Colombia's landholding oligarchy and it was these same colonizers that would later go on to form the FARC, the longest running rebel insurgency movement in Latin America's history. It was also under the National Front arrangement that the USA stepped up its commitments to Colombia as part of its new Cold War crusade of anti-communism. This period of US intervention marked a watershed in Colombian and US relations, with the Colombian military consistently remaining one of the largest recipients of US military aid and training throughout the Cold War. It was also the first country in Latin America to adopt US CI measures in relation to its perceived problems of insurgency and civil unrest and also hosted the first Latin America counter-insurgency training school.
By the late 1960s Colombia's military was firmly under the guidance of the USA. A 1969 Colombian CI manual lists eight US CI manuals as sources, combined with anthologies of articles published in the US Military Review. Colombia has also sent more students to the US CI training academy, the School of the Americas (SOA), than any other Latin American nation. Importantly, the Colombian military still maintains extensive ties to the USA, and is by far the largest recipient of US military aid in Latin America, and the third largest in the world. Despite these continuing ties, US objectives in Colombia are popularly viewed to have switched dramatically from anti-communist CI to a counter-narcotic war on drugs and, more recently, on terror. However, as Nazih Richani argues, there is a relative dearth of studies on Colombia, and this extends to substantive studies on US policy towards Colombia, particularly from more critical perspectives. Given the ongoing and massive levels of commitment on the part of the USA, coupled with the levels of violence and human rights abuses committed in the Colombian conflict, this book is an attempt to plug this gap and is thus primarily an examination of US policy in Colombia.
In relation to existing literatures on US foreign policy in Colombia, some taxonomic ordering is inevitable. Although this sometimes does violence to the subtle differences between thinkers and theories, it also provides a useful mechanism for revealing patterns. Broadly speaking, the different perspectives on US policy in Colombia both during and after the Cold War fall into two camps. The first is the mainstream camp, which is largely supportive of US policies and objectives in Colombia. This perspective is by far the largest, and spans the English-language academic literature, the American media and the US policy-making community. The second set of literature is critical of US policy and is much smaller. This set includes some academic literature, but rarely finds its way into the American media or the US policy-making community This book falls clearly into the critical camp.
As Robert Pastor notes, within the majority of mainstream academic approaches to the study of US foreign policy towards Latin America there are two main strands, conservative and liberal:
Conservatives focus on a relatively narrower idea of US interests and a military based definition of power. They believe that the United States should approach problems unilaterally and in a practical and forceful-solving manner. Liberals give higher priority to the moral dimension and to ... 'soft power,' which derives from the American model. They look at social and economic causes of the crisis, try to understand the issues from the other's perspective, and rely on multilateral, diplomatic approaches.
This distinction between mainstream liberal and conservative approaches provides a useful way of thinking through the differences between analysts on Colombia. Conservatives tend to emphasize military solutions to Colombia's conflict, view the Colombian military as the best way of implementing US interests, and see no ethical issues arising as a result of continued US support for the Colombian military. For example, Richard Downes argues that drug trafficking in Colombia jeopardizes the national security interests of the USA, with the 'impact of the drug industry ... devastating on US society'. He subsequently calls for an active military engagement with Colombia's 'narco-guerrillas' through the intensification of US military aid. David Passage also advocates an increase of US military aid to Colombia so as to help 'Colombia's democratically elected government regain control of its national territory' which can then 'halt the production of illegal narcotics' which threaten US national security interests. Angel Rabasa and Peter Chalk argue that US national security considerations are as significant as its alleged counter-narcotics concerns in Colombia, and trace this to Colombia's geostrategic importance. Both Rabasa and Chalk call for the USA to upgrade and modernize the Colombian military to regain control of Colombia's rural areas and to contain regional destabilization. Dennis Rempe's work begins by arguing that throughout the Cold War the US 'pursued an indirect policy that played to America's strengths: economic and military aid, training of security forces, technical assistance, and logistical and intelligence support' which furthered 'US Cold War interests'. Rempe continues that the primary threats to US interests in post-Cold War Colombia now come from illegal narcotics, with US policy switching from a strategy of anti-communist CI to a new war on drugs. Rempe states that US policy combines both 'counter-narcotics and institution-building strategies with a negotiated settlement to that nation's long-running insurgent war'. In fighting the war on drugs, Rempe cautions that Colombian policy-makers must 'concentrate security efforts on neutralizing the clandestine infrastructure and military power' of Colombia's 'narco-guerrillas'. He also recommends the incorporation of Colombia's clandestine paramilitary networks within an overall security system so as to improve the capacity for the war on drugs to eliminate the alleged interweaved problems of insurgency and narcotics trafficking.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from America's Other War by Doug Stokes. Copyright © 2005 Doug Stokes. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Interpreting US foreign policy in Colombia1. US objectives in Latin America during the Cold War
2. US objectives in Latin America after the Cold War
3. Installing State Terror in Colombia
4. From Communism to the War on Terror
Conclusion: Counter-insurgency, Capital and Crude