Rewriting the History of Plan Colombia

[Judi Lynn]

Rewriting the History of Plan Colombia
Posted 21 July 2015 13:54 GMT

It's probably a good thing that United States Army General John F. Kelly's May op-ed in the Miami Herald went largely unperceived, but recent developments have rendered the cynicism that informed it too blaring to ignore.

Ostensibly, General Kelly’s editorial seeks to extrapolate salient lessons from the Colombian government's military campaign against the country’s leftist guerrilla insurgency. Specifically, Kelly contends that Plan Colombia, the $9 billion U.S. military aid package passed in 2000, has “shown us the way” to defeat ISIS, which he claims poses a similarly “daunting challenge for the United States and its allies.”

On first read, the article is a relatively straightforward parade of banality and adulation, remarkable only because the individual leading it is the commander of U.S. Southern Command (Southcom). Sure, the content consists almost entirely of lies, half-truths, and meaningless platitudes, but nothing that ventures too far from the official Washington line.

Alex Lee, the deputy assistant secretary of state for South America and Cuba, and Bernie Aronson, the U.S. special envoy to Colombia's ongoing peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), gave similarly glowing appraisals to the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee just last month. And the Obama administration in general has not been adverse to overlooking human rights issues and overstating economic progress in Colombia–especially when it comes to the increasingly awful U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, which Mr. Obama strongly opposed in his 2008 campaign but has supported as president.

More:
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/07/21/rewriting-the-history-of-plan-colombia/

[Judi Lynn]

1. Information all US Americans, who support Colombia through obligatory taxes, should know.

The Colombian military, as revealed in court trials, has been involved in murdering innocent Colombian citizens, and pretending they were guerrilla "enemy" soldiers who had to be slaughtered.

From the original article:

Last month, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published “On their Watch,” a 95-page report that should eliminate any doubt as to the maliciousness of Kelly's intentions. Having reviewed months of in-depth interviews and research, the report's authors concluded, “There is abundant evidence indicating that numerous senior army officers bear responsibility” for the widespread Colombian military practice known as “false positives.”

False positives is a euphemism, an innocuous technical-sounding shield for a phenomenon HRW Americas Director Jose Miguel Vivanco has characterized as “one of the worst episodes of mass atrocity in the Western Hemisphere in recent years.” That it has stuck, and that even people who understand what it means still use it, is just one testament to the extent to which Kelly and company have been able to dictate the terms of the narrative “battle.”

What false positives actually entails is the systematic cold-blooded murder of civilians for profit and political gamesmanship, a coherent military strategy to inflate statistics by passing off executed civilians as rebels killed in combat. Often, units involved in the practice–and virtually every brigade in the Colombian Army has been–targeted the most vulnerable elements of society: the poor, drug-addicted, and mentally handicapped. In some cases, soldiers received fresh corpses from right-wing death squads and dressed them in rebel fatigues. This barbaric enterprise was, at the very least, condoned by the highest levels of the military and executive office and explicitly incentivized with bonuses, paid vacations, and promotions.

No one has ever accused Colombian justice of being among the “strong institutions” Kelly claims to admire, and false positives offers a fairly representative case study. According to HRW, prosecutors are assessing some 3,000 alleged false positive extrajudicial executions committed between 2002 and 2008. (In 2014, an authoritative report from the Fellowship of Reconciliation recorded 5,763 alleged cases between 2000 and 2010.) Of the roughly 800 soldiers thus far convicted, none rise above the rank of colonel. The Colombian Attorney General recently announced that 22 generals are under investigation for their role in the killings, but no general has been so much as indicted to date, and there is little reason to expect one will be soon.

[MisterP]

2. "shown us the way"? their worship of COIN and proxy forces in Iraq is what GOT us ISIS!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Option
and it didn't even WORK in El Salvador!

on both sides of the religious divide!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_of_Iraq
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Brigade_%28Iraq%29