U.S. imperialism in Latin America continues

Web Only// Features » September 11, 2013

Terror attacks are on the rise and millions remain displaced, but U.S. military aid keeps flowing.

By Jeremy Kryt

It’s a cruelly hot day in rebel-held territory. On a crumbling and abandoned plantation, in the insurgency riddled Cauca region of southwestern Colombia, more than three dozen indigenous leaders have gathered in the shade for a tribal meeting. Children’s murals and peace-themed banners cover the white-washed adobe walls. Outside, in the mortar-cratered fields that once grew sugar cane for the California market, shirtless men labor in the noon heat to plant beans and squash.

“We’re in a hard place,” says Ernesto Conda, a ruling council member of the Nasa tribe, one of several indigenous groups native to Cauca. Conda is 44 and wears his hair in a sleek black queue streaked with gray.

“Our people are always under fire here—always in range of the mortars and machine guns,” he says, taking a break from the tribal council to show this reporter around the former plantation, which the Nasa have occupied in a bid to raise subsistence crops. The twenty or so families who now squat here were driven from their homes in Cauca’s jungle-covered mountains by fighting between leftist guerrillas, right-wing militias, and Colombian troops.

These Nasa families are among the 4.7 million internally displaced Colombians produced by five decades of civil war, according to a recent study by a government-sponsored truth commission called the National Center for Historic Memory. The report revealed that the number of internal refugees in this resource-rich Andean nation is the highest of any country on earth. The struggle between Bogota’s armed forces and right-wing proxy militias and the nation’s largest, leftist insurgency, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), has claimed more than 220,000 lives, 82 percent of them civilians. Untold thousands of native Nasa have also been killed in the world’s longest-running civil war. In the Cauca region alone at least 128 native peoples have been slain in conflict-related violence since the start of 2012.

Peace talks aimed at ending the war with FARC—which can field about 9,000 fighters nationwide—have been dragging on in Havana, Cuba, since last fall. Little progress has been made so far, and the fighting continues apace. At least 44 government troops have been killed in the last two months, and at least 12 insurgents lost their lives to airstrikes in August. August also saw civilians erupt over the root causes of the armed conflict—vast poverty and stark inequality of land ownership. Massive protests aimed at land reform and curtailing economic globalization shook the country. Despite a crackdown on demonstrations by President Juan Santos, the ongoing protests continue to paralyze shipping and transportation, especially in war-torn rural regions like Cauca.

In spite of its poor track record on human rights, Colombia remains a close regional ally of Washington, and, under the umbrella of the Drug War, receives more military aid than any other nation in the hemisphere. But now, in the wake of the truth commission report and Bogota’s brutal response to the nationwide protests, a growing chorus of international observers contend that U.S. foreign policy—including military aid and trade agreements—could be helping to fuel the violence and contributing to the plights of those caught in the crossfire, like Conda’s displaced Nasa families.

“Free trade agreements, and globalization in general, have winners and losers,” says Adam Isacson, of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), in an interview with In These Times. “When they protest what is being done to them, those on the losing end are often accused of sympathizing with guerrillas, and end up facing a response from Colombia's security forces. The same forces that have been aided and strengthened by many years of U.S. assistance.”