The U.S. Engagement with Colombia

The U.S. Engagement with Colombia

Author: Gabriel Marcella

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 28

ISBN-13:

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Outlines a new, more holistic U.S. approach in Colombia that would require a more comprehensive package of military assistance rather than one narrowly focused on narcotics suppression and interdiction.


America's Other War

America's Other War

Author: Doug Stokes

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2013-07-04

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1848136129

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This controversial book maintains that in Colombia the US has long supported a pervasive campaign of state violence directed against both armed insurgents and a wide range of unarmed progressive social forces. While the context may change from one decade to the next, the basic policies remain the same: maintain the pro-US Colombian state, protect US economic interests and preserve strategic access to oil. Colombia is now the third largest recipient of US military aid in the world, and the largest by far in Latin America. Using extensive declassified documents, this book shows that the so-called "war on drugs", and now the new war on terror in Colombia are actually part of a long-term Colombian "war of state terror" that predates the end of the Cold War with US policy contributing directly to the human rights situation in Colombia today.


Preventive Engagement

Preventive Engagement

Author: Paul B. Stares

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2017-12-19

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0231544189

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The United States faces an increasingly turbulent world. The risk of violent conflict and other threats to international order presents a vexing dilemma: should the United States remain the principal guarantor of global peace and security with all its considerable commitments and potential pitfalls––not least new and costly military entanglements––that over time diminish its capacity and commitment to play this vital role or, alternatively, should it pull back from the world in the interests of conserving U.S. power, but at the possible cost of even greater threats emerging in the future? Paul B. Stares proposes an innovative and timely strategy—“preventive engagement”—to resolve America’s predicament. This approach entails pursuing three complementary courses of action: promoting policies known to lessen the risk of violent conflict over the long term; anticipating and averting those crises likely to lead to costly military commitments in the medium term; and managing ongoing conflicts in the short term before they escalate further and exert pressure on the United States to intervene. In each of these efforts, forging “preventive partnerships” with a variety of international actors, including the United Nations, regional organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and the business community, is essential. The need to think and act ahead that lies at the heart of a preventive engagement strategy requires the United States to become less shortsighted and reactive. Drawing on successful strategies in other areas, Preventive Engagement provides a detailed and comprehensive blueprint for the United States to shape the future and reduce the potential dangers ahead.


Persistent Engagement in Colombia

Persistent Engagement in Colombia

Author: Mark Moyar

Publisher: Independently Published

Published: 2019-07-07

Total Pages: 92

ISBN-13: 9781079024494

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In this monograph, Dr. Mark Moyar, Brigadier General (retired) Hector Pagan, and Lieutenant Colonel (retired) Wil R. Griego analyze United States Special Operations Forces' (USSOF) assistance to Colombia in the context of decades of counterinsurgency and counternarcotics operations. While the case of Colombia is often cited as an exemplar of global Special Operations Forces (SOF) foreign engagement, the details of the engagement, and the reasons for its success, have not previously been addressed in a scholarly publication. This study represents the first comprehensive analysis of the persistent SOF engagement in Colombia. It draws upon the collective wisdom of numerous U.S. and Colombian government personnel, and the authors' own decades of experience in Colombia and other countries where the United States has undertaken prolonged partnership.The authors attribute the success of SOF engagement in Colombia to the long-term development of human capital in the Colombian security forces. As trainers, educators, and advisors, U.S. special operators helped nurture Colombian officers and NCOs who would rise through the ranks into key positions of leadership. The huge improvements in Colombian counterinsurgency and counternarcotics performance were the result, first and foremost, of dedicated and skilled Colombian leaders


Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats

Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats

Author: Winifred Tate

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2015-06-10

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780804792011

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In 2000, the U.S. passed a major aid package that was going to help Colombia do it all: cut drug trafficking, defeat leftist guerrillas, support peace, and build democracy. More than 80% of the assistance, however, was military aid, at a time when the Colombian security forces were linked to abusive, drug-trafficking paramilitary forces. Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats examines the U.S. policymaking process in the design, implementation, and consequences of Plan Colombia, as the aid package came to be known. Winifred Tate explores the rhetoric and practice of foreign policy by the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon, Congress, and the U.S. military Southern Command. Tate's ethnography uncovers how policymakers' utopian visions and emotional entanglements play a profound role in their efforts to orchestrate and impose social transformation abroad. She argues that U.S. officials' zero tolerance for illegal drugs provided the ideological architecture for the subsequent militarization of domestic drug policy abroad. The U.S. also ignored Colombian state complicity with paramilitary brutality, presenting them as evidence of an absent state and the authentic expression of a frustrated middle class. For rural residents of Colombia living under paramilitary dominion, these denials circulated as a form of state terror. Tate's analysis examines how oppositional activists and the policy's targets—civilians and local state officials in southern Colombia—attempted to shape aid design and delivery, revealing the process and effects of human rights policymaking.


Partnership for the Americas: Western Hemisphere Strategy and U.S. Southern Command

Partnership for the Americas: Western Hemisphere Strategy and U.S. Southern Command

Author: James G. Stavridis

Publisher: NDU Press

Published: 2014-02-23

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13:

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Since its creation in 1963, United States Southern Command has been led by 30 senior officers representing all four of the armed forces. None has undertaken his leadership responsibilities with the cultural sensitivity and creativity demonstrated by Admiral Jim Stavridis during his tenure in command. Breaking with tradition, Admiral Stavridis discarded the customary military model as he organized the Southern Command Headquarters. In its place he created an organization designed not to subdue adversaries, but instead to build durable and enduring partnerships with friends. His observation that it is the business of Southern Command to launch "ideas not missiles" into the command's area of responsibility gained strategic resonance throughout the Caribbean and Central and South America, and at the highest levels in Washington, DC.


Colombia and World War I

Colombia and World War I

Author: Jane M. Rausch

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2014-06-12

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 0739187740

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In the horrific conflict of 1914–1918 known first as “The Great War” and later as World War I, Latin American nations were peripheral players. Only after the U.S. entered the fighting in 1917 did eight of the twenty republics declare war. Five others broke diplomatic relations with Germany, while seven maintained strict neutrality. These diplomatic stances, even those of the two actual belligerents—Brazil and Cuba—did little to tip the balance of victory in favor of the allies, and perhaps that explains why historians have paid scant attention to events in Latin America related to the war. Nevertheless, it is still remarkable that Percy Alvin Martin’s classic account, Latin American and the War, first published in 1925, remains the standard text on the topic. This book attempts to redress this gap by taking a fresh look at developments between 1914 and 1921 in one of the neutral nations—Colombia. This period, which coincides with the presidency of José Vicente Concha (1914–1918) and his successor, Marco Fidel Suárez (1918–1921), is filled with momentous developments not only in foreign policy, when Colombian diplomats pressured by German, British and U.S. propaganda struggled to maintain strict neutrality, but also on the domestic scene as the newly installed Conservative regime faced political and economic crises that sparked numerous and violent protests. Rausch's examination of the administrations of Concha and Suárez supports Martin’s assertion that even those countries neutral in the Great War were not immune from its effects.


Linked Labor Histories

Linked Labor Histories

Author: Aviva Chomsky

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2008-04-01

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 082238891X

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Exploring globalization from a labor history perspective, Aviva Chomsky provides historically grounded analyses of migration, labor-management collaboration, and the mobility of capital. She illuminates the dynamics of these movements through case studies set mostly in New England and Colombia. Taken together, the case studies offer an intricate portrait of two regions, their industries and workers, and the myriad links between them over the long twentieth century, as well as a new way to conceptualize globalization as a long-term process. Chomsky examines labor and management at two early-twentieth-century Massachusetts factories: one that transformed the global textile industry by exporting looms around the world, and another that was the site of a model program of labor-management collaboration in the 1920s. She follows the path of the textile industry from New England, first to the U.S. South, and then to Puerto Rico, Japan, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and Colombia. She considers how towns in Rhode Island and Massachusetts began to import Colombian workers as they struggled to keep their remaining textile factories going. Most of the workers eventually landed in service jobs: cleaning houses, caring for elders, washing dishes. Focusing on Colombia between the 1960s and the present, Chomsky looks at the Urabá banana export region, where violence against organized labor has been particularly acute, and, through a discussion of the AFL-CIO’s activities in Colombia, she explores the thorny question of U.S. union involvement in foreign policy. In the 1980s, two U.S. coal mining companies began to shift their operations to Colombia, where they opened two of the largest open-pit coal mines in the world. Chomsky assesses how different groups, especially labor unions in both countries, were affected. Linked Labor Histories suggests that economic integration among regions often exacerbates regional inequalities rather than ameliorating them.