Reply #13: Here's a newly published interview from Red Pepper [View All]

[Say_What]

The woman being interviewed thinks that the US is trying to make it's own Israel in Latin America--a place that will be propped up with US military aid and loyal to US interests. This makes sense--particularly now that the Panama military base, from which all interventions in Latin America since WWII emenated, closed in 1999.

<clips>

Mariela Kohon: In your recently published book Inside Colombia, you state that Plan Colombia has been turned from a peace plan into a ‘battle plan’ and that ‘the military element is by far the most important’. What is Plan Colombia and what do you mean by this statement?

Grace Livingstone: There were two versions of Plan Colombia. The first version was written in Spanish by Colombians in May 1999. It was not particularly radical, but it was a peace and development plan which aimed to dissuade peasants from growing coca crops or joining armed groups by investing in alternative rural development and education. It did not mention drugs trafficking, military action or spraying crops with pesticides.

US officials re-wrote the draft entirely in October 1999. Their involvement was so extensive that the final version of Plan Colombia was published in English – not Spanish. Strengthening the authority of the state (by re-equipping and expanding the armed forces) became the main objective. An intensive militarised crop spraying campaign was also introduced. The US basically transformed Plan Colombia to meet their own perceived security needs – that is, the need to combat the Colombian guerrillas. It was used as a vehicle to step up counter-insurgency aid and US military involvement in Colombia at a time when combating drugs was the only acceptable pretext for intervention.

Some have argued that Colombia’s recently elected president, Alvaro Uribe Velez, with the backing of the US, is imposing ‘state terrorism’. What are your thoughts on this?

Colombia’s human rights record was so appalling in the 1990s that the US Congress banned all military aid to Colombia, except counter-narcotics aid. Of course, the counter-drugs aid found its way to counter-insurgency units and to the paramilitaries, but at least US politicians showed some awareness of the human rights problem. The ban also stemmed from a desire not to repeat the horrors of US foreign policy in Central America in the 1980s. Under the auspices of fighting communism, an illegal and cruel war was launched in Nicaragua, thousands were ‘disappeared’ in El Salvador and 200,000 people were murdered in Guatemala.

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Dec2003/x-Dec2003-Livingstone.html