Tag Archives: #Colombia

Is Trump looking for war in the south Caribbean?

by Jim Hodgson

In this decade of Donald Trump at centre-stage, it has been hard to choose a moment or an issue about which to react. The former reality TV star is an expert in deflection and distraction.

Yet some things (Israel’s genocide in Gaza is one) matter more than others. So too Trump’s threats against Venezuela.

Trump’s statement below defending extrajudicial executions shows again how little he values human life. He was responding to a question from a journalist on Oct. 23 about why he didn’t ask Congress for a declaration of war against drug cartels he claims are at war with the United States: 

“Well, I don’t think we’re gonna necessarily ask for a declaration of war, I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. OK? We’re going to kill them. You know? They’re going to be, like dead. OK?”

Over the past two months, Trump’s assassins have killed at least 43 people and sunk ten small boats in the Caribbean and along the Pacific coast of Colombia. As Greg Grandin has documented, when the U.S. withdraws from the rest of the world, it doubles down in this hemisphere.

This time, the United States isn’t even bothering with its usual lies as it moves from a decade of sanctions (“unilateral coercive measures”) to threats of war as it presses for regime change in Venezuela. Sanctions have had devastating effects in Venezuela, according to a study conducted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and published in August in The Lancet Global Health.

Trump’s ire is mostly directed against Venezuela, which since 1998 has refused imperial orders about oil, medical care, governance, and individualistic notions of human rights. But he has plenty left over for Colombia and Mexico.

“He’s a thug” and an “illegal drug leader,” Trump said of Colombian President Gustavo Petro. And he said Mexico is governed by drug cartels, even while expressing respect for President Claudia Sheinbaum.

The text below is translated and lightly adapted from an Oct. 25 editorial in the Mexico City daily La Jornada.

Washington seeks war

The Trump administration is sending increasingly alarming signals about its determination to attack Venezuela to impose regime change and install a puppet administration. Trump uses a “combination of threats of armed action and economic extortion” to support right-wing politicians in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador and now Bolivia “to facilitate the rise or consolidation of the far right throughout the hemisphere.”

On Oct. 24, his “War Department” announced the deployment of an aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, and its strike group to the U.S. Southern Command—that is, the southern Caribbean and northern South America. This entails the presence of the aircraft carrier itself, the 75 aircraft it carries, and the full range of necessary operations: three destroyers, a replenishment ship, a dry cargo ship, and a Coast Guard cutter. The Gerald R. Ford alone carries 4,600 military personnel, in addition to the crews of auxiliary vessels. 

The argument that all these vessels are being deployed with the goal of “dismantling Designated Terrorist Organizations (DTOs) and countering narco-terrorism in defence of the homeland” doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. First of all, they could be deployed off the US coast, thereby reducing the cost of maintaining long supply chains and avoiding diplomatic friction. 

The thousands of soldiers already sent to the Caribbean could have provided a much greater service to their homeland by monitoring land and air points of entry, where narcotics actually enter the United States. Instead of spending billions of dollars operating its fleets abroad, Washington could gain vast resources by combating money laundering within its own financial system, where authorities estimate that organized crime launders $300 billion annually. If traffickers were unable to collect and move the profits from their activities, they would be immediately paralyzed. But it is clear that the White House is not interested in the health of its citizens or the legality of the money circulating through its banks.

The bellicose tone of this escalation is so evident that even Brazilian President Luiz Inácio da Silva (Lula—who is not friendly to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro) criticized the U.S. bombing of boats in the Caribbean, noting that “if it becomes fashionable, everyone will believe they can invade someone else’s territory and do whatever they want,” thus turning the region into a lawless land. 

Lula’s special advisor and former Foreign Minister Celso Amorim warned that external intervention, whether armed or through intelligence services, is not the way to decide who will govern Venezuela, a problem that concerns only Venezuelans. He also warned of the danger of setting South America ablaze and leading to the radicalization of politics throughout the continent. At the same time, Washington is making clear its longing to empower the Colombian oligarchy in Bogotá, always ready to follow its directives and make the Andean-Caribbean territory available to its troops and spy agencies. 

In this regard, Trump escalated his attacks against President Gustavo Petro and imposed sanctions for “allowing drug cartels to flourish and refusing to stop this activity.” No evidence was presented, which is what happens in his constant diatribes against Mexico, Venezuela, and other nations whose governments protect their independence and sovereignty.

In South America, there is no war that justifies besieging the subcontinent with a series of attacks. But it becomes increasingly clear that the White House is determined to start a conflagration, no matter how absurd its pretexts. 

The international community, and particularly Latin American and Caribbean societies, must join forces in rejecting Trump’s attempt to plunge the region into barbarism in order to divert attention from his own ineptitude and hand over vast amounts of money to the military-industrial complex, the only sector whose prosperity apparently interests the U.S. president.

…

Here’s a way to keep up with Trump’s threats and responses from Caribbean and Latin American political and social movement leaders. The Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR) has been a good source of information on U.S. intervention in the region for decades. 

On murder and a birthday cake: Reflections on Colombia’s search for peace with justice

In human rights work, one’s first duty is to those who are harmed. But once in a while, one of the murderers says something that seizes attention as it reveals again the full banality of evil.

On July 19 in northern Colombia, the former professional solider Álex José Mercado asked forgiveness from a young woman for the murder of her father, saying: “The day that he was turned over to me (for killing), he had gone out to get a cake for your birthday.” In another moment, he said that he was not worthy to ask forgiveness from family members, but could only ask for pardon from God. “I lent myself to murder innocent people,” he said. He was 19 at the time at the time of his crimes.

This occurred during a hearing in Valledupar of Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (referred to in Spanish as JEP). It’s the transitional tribunal that was set up to prosecute the perpetrators of crimes committed during six decades of armed conflict between the FARC-EP guerrilla fighters and the Colombian state. This hearing focused on the  falsos positivos, the false positives, that occurred just in the northern departments of Cesar and Guajira. In the country as a whole, Colombia’s armed forces kidnapped more than 6,000 young men, murdered them, dressed them as guerrillas, and then tried to pass them off “successes” in its war on “terrorism.”

Others spoke for the victims: 

Left: Pedro Loperena, representing the Wiwa Indigenous people, said: “The economic aid policies of those who gave funds to the military forces must also be re-evaluated, because those resources were used to carry out these misdeeds.” Right: Daniela Rodríguez, spokesperson for the legal representatives of the victims and in the name of the Political Prisoners Solidarity Committee and the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective (CCAJAR), asked that the “centrality of the victims, their desires and expectations, be drives these proceedings.”

When he spoke about aid to the Colombian military, Loperena was polite and understated the problem:

This chart from U.S. civil society organizations shows more than two decades of U.S. aid to Colombia.

Over decades, the U.S. and Colombian governments have successively painted the war as: first, a war against communism; then, a war against drugs; and now, a war against terrorism. But the war in Colombia had its roots in the same struggle that has gone on in Latin America since the time of the European Conquest: the struggle by small farmers, Indigenous people and urban workers for land, social justice and basic human rights.

In the face of a peace process that has had limited support (and sometimes overt opposition) from the Colombian state, headed these past four years by Ivan Duque, that these tribunals continue to function is a triumph. 

One of the hardest parts of achieving a peace agreement between the Colombian state and the FARC guerrillas was to find language about how to manage crimes committed by state and non-state actors during the conflict. The two sides began negotiating in Havana in November 2012. The agreement on transitional justice and reparations was achieved in 2015 and the full peace accord signed in December 2016. The former adversaries agreed to a form of transitional justice, creating special tribunals to judge crimes committed by both members of the FARC and by state agents. 

It is not an amnesty, despite former president Álvaro Uribe’s characterization of the accord. In fact, that was what was avoided. Under international law that has come into force since the South African transition from apartheid to democracy in 1994, a full amnesty would not be legal. 

In November 2019, the Mesa Ecuménica por la Paz (Ecumenical Table for Peace) presented its report, “Blood of Martyrs, Seeds of Liberation,” to the chair of Colombia’s Truth Commission, Fr. Francisco de Roux SJ. In presenting the report, Omar Fernández acknowledged that it was not possible to encompass all of the many Christian martyrs of this long war: the team focused on those whose pastoral work represented the Church of the Poor.

Another triumph in recent weeks is the publication June 28 of the report of Colombia’s Truth Commission. Speaking July 14 to the United Nations Security Council, commission president Fr. Francisco de Roux said  that Colombia has demonstrated that those wounded by war can come together to build peace, happiness and “produce a tomorrow where there is hope”.  Over the last four years, the Commission has heard from more than 30,000 individuals and bodies and reviewed over 1,000 reports from victimized communities. He urged  the international community to give Colombia “nothing for war.”

Top of the list of recent triumphs is, of course, is the election of a new president, Gustavo Petro, and vice-president, Francia Márquez. Like the truth commission, Petro has criticized the U.S.-led war on drugs. The truth commission has urged Petro to lead a global conversation on changing drug policies, with a focus on regulation over criminalization.

Petro and Márquez will take office on Aug. 7, and already there is talk of capital flight – in effect, a boycott of Colombia by rich investors, including Colombians who already have one foot in Miami. The road ahead – ending the alliances of military forces with paramilitary death squads and drug-traffickers, ending the practice of assassinating leaders of social movements (at least 145 in 2021), protecting rain forests and reducing the grotesque gaps between wealth and poverty – will be difficult as evidenced by this long (and nevertheless incomplete) list of U.S.-sponsored coups and invasions launched against left leaders in Latin America.