Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia

216 Pages·2011·1.832 MB·English

by  Oliver Villar, Drew Cottle

C , D S ,
OCAINE EATH QUADS
W T
AND THE AR ON ERROR

2
Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on
Terror
U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia

and
OLIVER VILLAR DREW COTTLE

3
Copyright © 2011 by Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Villar, Oliver.
Cocaine, death squads, and the war on terror : U.S. imperialism and class struggle in
Colombia / Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-58367-251-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58367-252-5
(cloth : alk. paper) 1. Drug traffic—Prevention—Government policy—United States.
2. Cocaine industry—Colombia. 3. Social conflict—Colombia. 4. United States—
Foreign economic relations—Colombia. 5. Colombia—Foreign economic relations—
United States. I. Cottle, Drew.
II. Title.
HV8079.N3V55 2011
363.4509861—dc23
2011044284

Monthly Review Press
146 West 29th Street, Suite 6W
New York, NY 10001
www.monthlyreview.org

5 4 3 2 1
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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOREWORD by Peter Dale Scott
INTRODUCTION: A War of Many Wars

1. From Coca to Cocaine
2. From the Golden Triangle to the Crystal Triangle
3. A Narco-State and a Narco-Economy
4. The Narco-Cartel System (1980–1993)
5. The Post-Cartel System
6. The United States and “Plan Colombia”
7. Narco-State Terror
8. The Consequences of Relocation and Regionalization
9. The War on Drugs: Corporatization and Privatization
10. Conclusion: U.S. Narco-Colonialism and Colombia
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES
INDEX
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For the workers and peasants of Colombia

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Acknowledgments

In a general sense, this book is indebted to the dynamic reservoir of radical and
revolutionary thought and organization in Australia and the Americas (Latin America,
the United States of America, and Canada). However, we would like to thank Rob
O’Neill, Henry Veltmeyer, and Oktay Suleyman Kahraman. Their support made this
book possible. We also thank Peter Dale Scott and Alfred W. McCoy for their
generous email correspondence over the years and to all who responded to this study.
The authors gratefully acknowledge the unselfish and extraordinary support from our
families and friends, especially Angela Keys for her painstaking editorial assistance.
Our greatest debt is to those who have paid a very high price for truth, justice, and
opposition to U.S. imperialism and narco-colonialism.
—Bathurst, 2011

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Foreword
by Peter Dale Scott

Colombia’s history is a chronicle of violence and class warfare dating back to the
Spanish era with its institutions of slavery and semifeudal land allocation. But this
important book shows how in the last half-century the United States has helped to
centralize and militarize the class conflict, and above all how cocaine has come to play
a central role in financing this oppression.
American involvement in Colombian repression can be traced back to President
Kennedy, who, faced with generals intent on ousting Fidel Castro from Cuba,
authorized instead a program of anti-communist counterinsurgency in South America,
and above all Colombia. In February 1962, a U.S. Special Warfare team first visited
Colombia, and set in motion an era of systematic, centralized counterterror, inflicted
by professionally trained paramilitary units. Fearing that Castro might soon try to
export his revolution to the South American continent, the Special Warfare experts at
Fort Bragg rushed to instruct the Colombian army in the same counterinsurgency
techniques then being introduced into Vietnam. A trip report to the Joint Chiefs of
Staff recommended development of “a civil and military structure . . . to 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.”1
In the wake of the visit, a series of training teams arrived, contributing to the
Colombian army’s Plan Lazo, a comprehensive counterinsurgency plan implemented
between 1962 and 1965. It was in response to this systematic campaign in the
reinforcement of class repression, rather than to any outside assistance from Castro,
that FARC and ELN were first organized in 1964. As Michael McClintock has
observed, “The banditry of the early 1960s . . . was transformed into organized
revolutionary guerrilla warfare after 1965, which has continued to date.”2
An important ingredient in the Fort Bragg approach to counterinsurgency, as
reflected in its training manuals, was the organization of “self-defense units” and other
paramilitary groups, including “hunter-killer teams.”3 The thinking and nomenclature
of these field manuals were translated and cited in the Colombian army’s counter-
guerrilla manual, Reglamento de Combate de Contraguerrillas. It defined the self-
defense group (junta de auto-defensa) as “an organization of a military nature made up
of select civilian personnel from the combat zone who are trained and equipped to
carry out actions against groups of guerrillas.”4 The autodefensas (as the paramilitaries
are now called in Colombia) have been a scourge ever since.
8
The CIA and Drug-Financed Autodefensas

In the 1970s, the CIA offered further training to Colombian and other Latin American
police at its so-called bomb school in Los Fresnos, Texas. There USAID, under CIA’s
so-called Public Safety Program, taught a curriculum including “Terrorist Concepts;
Terrorist Devices; Fabrication and Functioning of Devices; Improvised Triggering
Devices; Incendiaries,” and “Assassination Weapons: A Discussion of Various
Weapons which May Be Used by the Assassin.” During congressional hearings, AID
officials admitted that the so-called bomb school offered lessons not in bomb disposal
but in bomb making.5
Trained terrorist counterrevolutionaries thus became assets of the Colombian
state security apparatus. They were also employed by U.S. corporations anxious to
protect their workforces from unionization, as well as in anti-union campaigns by
Colombian suppliers to large U.S. corporations.6 Oil companies in particular have
been part of the state-coordinated campaign against left-wing guerrillas. In June 2001,
a Colombian court heard how a U.S. security firm working for Occidental Petroleum
had played a fatal role in an ill-starred army raid against FARC, “directing helicopter
gunships that mistakenly killed eighteen civilians.”7
Other accounts of the Colombian conflict have ignored this early U.S. input into
paramilitary organization and date the army-paramilitary alliance from 1981. That was
the year in which the country’s major cocaine traffickers, collaborating with the
Colombian army, established a training school for a nationwide counterterrorist
network, Muerte a Sequestradores (Death to Kidnappers, or MAS).8 The traffickers
put up the money, and the generals contracted for Israeli and British mercenaries to
come to Colombia to run the death squad school. A leading graduate was Carlos
Castaño, the notorious drug trafficker and founder of the United Self-Defense Forces
of Colombia (AUC).
Although the stated purpose of the network was to combat kidnapping (a
preferred fund-raising technique of the FARC), MAS played an overtly political role
as a criminal extension of the army. Most notably, it enabled the army to frustrate the
peace agreement negotiated with the FARC by President Betancur in the 1980s, by
murdering over seven hundred FARC members who entered the constitutional political
process as members of a political party, the Unión Patriótica.9 There is no sign that the
Reagan administration, which disapproved of Betancur and his peace plan, exerted any
pressure on the army to stop these killings.
The autodefensas operated with impunity until 1989, when their activities were
outlawed. But Human Rights Watch, in a detailed report, has documented how in 1991
U.S. military and CIA personnel collaborated with the Colombian army to institute a
new system of civilian intelligence units. Despite express prohibitions in the army’s
grounding document, Order 200–05/91, some of these units continued to act as
paramilitaries and were armed, sometimes with U.S. equipment, by the Colombian
army.10 “In the name of fighting drugs, the CIA financed new military intelligence
networks there in 1991. But the new networks did little to stop drug traffickers.
Instead, they incorporated illegal paramilitary groups into their ranks and strengthened
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existing death squads.”11
In a new report in 2000, Human Rights Watch continued to document the
involvement of senior army commanders in the planning and execution of paramilitary
massacres. According to the report, “Evidence . . . links half of Colombia’s eighteen
brigade-level army units to paramilitary activity.” The report also describes a process,
called legalización, whereby paramilitaries bring civilian corpses to army barracks and
exchange them for weapons. The officers then claim that the corpses were guerrillas
killed in battle.12
The intent of these U.S.-backed strategies has been to drive the FARC out of oil-
bearing northern and central Colombia into the Amazon region southeast of the
cordillera, a remote zone that for years after 1998 was virtually conceded to it by the
central government. There, the former guerrilla force became in effect a governing
one, administering and taxing the regions it controlled.
The Resulting Symbiosis between Militarization and the
Narco-Economy

Ironically, the result of another U.S. policy, drug eradication, has been to turn this
region into a major coca-producing area. This might have been predicted when the
United States vigorously pursued coca eradication programs in nearby Bolivia and
Peru. Despite the spectacular reductions in these countries, “there was no large decline
in the total area under cultivation: coca cultivation expanded in Colombia to take up
the slack.”13 Politically, however, the situation was very different. Coca production
became concentrated in an area under the ongoing control of a revolutionary force, in
a region where the central government could not normally operate.
Thus the end result was to validate what was earlier a phantom U.S. nightmare:
the “narco-guerrilla.” The term “narco-guerrilla” had been mocked by experts when it
was coined in the Casey-Bush years of the Reagan administration, and shown to be the
deceptive rhetoric of right-wing intelligence agents in Latin America who were
themselves involved with drug traffickers.14 Even when Clinton’s drug czar, General
Barry McCaffrey, renewed the war cry against “narco-guerrillas” in 1997, the New
York Times pointed out that the term had been publicly disputed by the American
ambassador to Colombia, Myles R. Frechette.15
But after Plan Colombia in 2000, the Pentagon was finally engaged in a struggle
against a drug-financed FARC, a struggle that Congress would support. Aid to the
Colombian army, cut off by Congress in 1994 because of human rights violations, was
restored in 2000 through Plan Colombia.
Increasing CIA Involvement in the Narcotics Traffic
10