A War Of Terror

Last week, on the day George Bush delivered his State of the Union address, the Pentagon received avisitor. A few hours before the president told the American people that "we will not permit the triumphof violence in the affairs of men", General Carlos Ospina, head of the Colombian army, was shaking handswith his American counterpart. He had come to discuss the latest installment of US military aid.

General Ospina has done well. Just four years ago, he was a lieutenant-colonel in command of the army'sFourth Brigade. He was promoted first to divisional commander, then, in August last year, to chief of thearmy. But let us dwell for a moment on his career as a brigadier, and his impressive contribution to the waragainst terror.

According to Human Rights Watch, the Fourth Brigade, under Ospina's command, worked alongside the deathsquads controlled by the paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño. In a report published three years ago, itsummarises the results of an investigation carried out by the Attorney General's office in Colombia. OnOctober 25th 1997, a force composed of Ospina's regulars and Castaño's paramilitaries surrounded a villagecalled El Aro, in a region considered sympathetic to the country's left-wing guerillas. The soldiers cordonedoff the village while Castaño's men moved in. They captured a shopkeeper, tied him to a tree, gouged out hiseyes, cut off his tongue and castrated him. The other residents tried to flee, but were turned back byOspina's troops. The paramilitaries then mutilated and beheaded eleven of the villagers, including threechildren, burned the church, the pharmacy and most of the houses and smashed the water pipes. When they left,they took 30 people with them, who are now listed among Colombia's disappeared.

This operation was unusual only in that it has been so well-documented: among other sources, theinvestigators interviewed one Francisco Enrique Villalba, who was a member of the death squad which carriedout the massacre, and who had witnessed the prior coordination of the raid between the army and Castaño'slieutenants. The attack on El Aro was one of dozens of atrocities which Human Rights Watch alleges wereassisted by the Fourth Brigade. Villalba testified that the brigade would "legalise" the killingshis squad carried out: the paramilitaries would hand the corpses of the civilians they had murdered to thesoldiers, and in return the soldiers would give them grenades and munitions. The brigade would then dress thecorpses in army uniforms and claim them as the bodies of rebels it had shot.

A separate investigation by the Colombian internal affairs agency documented hundreds of mobile phone andpager communications between the death squads and the officers of the Fourth Brigade, among themLieutenant-Colonel Ospina. On Tuesday, Ospina fiercely denied the allegations, claiming that they werepolitically-motivated and that "honest people around the world know that we are serving our peoplewell."

In same press conference, however, he also revealed that this month the Colombian government will start todeploy a new kind of "self-defence force", composed of armed civilians backed by the army. Humanrights groups allege that the government has simply legalised the death squads.

Official paramilitary forces of this kind were first mobilised by the current president, Alvaro Uribe, whenhe was governor of the state of Antioquia in the mid-1990s. The civilian forces he established there, like allthe paramilitaries working with the army, carried out massacres, the assassination of peasant and trade unionleaders and what Colombians call "social cleansing": the killing of homeless people, drug addictsand petty criminals. They joined forces with the unofficial death squads and began to profit from drugstrafficking. They were banned after Uribe ceased to be governor. One of his first acts when he becamePresident in August last year was to promote General Ospina, and instruct him to develop similar networksthroughout the contested regions of Colombia.

Uribe, a landowner with major business interests, was the US government's favoured candidate. After he waselected, but before he assumed the presidency, it granted Colombia a special package of military aid worth $80million. Its military funding, through the programmes it calls Plan Colombia and the Andean RegionalInitiative, now amounts to $2 billion over the past four years. At the beginning of last month, US SpecialForces arrived in Colombia to help train General Ospina's troops. One of the two brigades they are assisting -the 5th - has also been named by Human Rights Watch for alleged involvement in paramilitary killings. It hasbeen equipped with helicopters by the US army.

The United States has been at war in Colombia for over 50 years. It has, however, hesitated to explainprecisely whom it is fighting. Officially, it is now involved there in a "war on terror". BeforeSeptember 2001, it was a "war on drugs"; before that, a "war on communism". In essence,however, US intervention in Colombia is unchanged: this remains, as it has always been, a war on the poor.

There is little doubt that the FARC, the main left-wing rebel group, has been diverted from its originalrevolutionary purpose by power politics and the struggle for the control of drugs money. It finances itselfpartly through extortion and kidnap. Whether it could fairly be described as a terrorist network, though, isopen to question. What is unequivocal is that the great majority of the country's political killings arecommitted not by FARC or the other rebels but by the right-wing paramilitaries working with the army. Theirtask is to terrorise the population into acquiesence with the government's programmes.

The purpose of this unending war is to secure those parts of the country which are rich in naturalresources for Colombian landowners and foreign multinationals. Colombia has one of the most unequal economiesin the world - the top 10% of the population earns 60 times as much as the bottom 10% - and there is no roomin that country for both the aspirations of the poor and the aspirations of the super-rich. One faction has tobe suppressed. The Colombian army is making the country safe for business. This is why, over the past tenyears, the paramilitaries it works with have killed some 15,000 trades unionists, peasant and indigenousleaders, human rights workers, land reform activists, leftwing politicians and their sympathisers. This is whyit is the world's third largest recipient (after Israel and Egypt) of US military aid.

The people funding this programme are Britain's allies in the war against terror. They are the people whohave awarded themselves the power to arbitrate between good and evil. They are the people who will, within thenext few weeks, attack Iraq on behalf of civilisation. "Throughout the 20th century," Bush told theUnited States last week, "small groups of men seized control of great nations, built armies and arsenals,and set out to dominate the weak and intimidate the world. In each case, their ambitions of cruelty and murderhad no limit." America's continuing adventure in Colombia suggests that little has changed.

George Monbiot is Honorary Professor at theDepartment of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at theUniversity of East London and the author of CaptiveState: the corporate takeover of Britain, and the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows,Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian, UK.