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.
For more than fifty years, the United States supported the Colombian military in a war that cost over 200,000 lives. During a single period of heightened U.S. assistance known as Plan Colombia, the Colombian military killed more than 5,000 civilians. In Plan Colombia John Lindsay-Poland narrates a 2005 massacre in the San José de Apartadó Peace Community and the subsequent investigation, official cover-up, and response from the international community. He examines how the multibillion-dollar U.S. military aid and official indifference contributed to the Colombian military's atrocities. Drawing on his human rights activism and interviews with military officers, community members, and human rights defenders, Lindsay-Poland describes grassroots initiatives in Colombia and the United States that resisted militarized policy and created alternatives to war. Although they had few resources, these initiatives offered models for constructing just and peaceful relationships between the United States and other nations. Yet, despite the civilian death toll and documented atrocities, Washington, DC, considered Plan Colombia's counterinsurgency campaign to be so successful that it became the dominant blueprint for U.S. military intervention around the world.
Strategically located at the gateway to the South American continent, Colombia has long been a key player in shaping the United States' involvement with its Latin American neighbors. In this book Stephen J. Randall examines the course of U.S.-Colombian relations over two centuries, taking into account the broad spectrum of political, social, cultural, and economic contacts that have figured in the interaction. A leader in the movement for independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, Colombia shared with the United States the aspiration of becoming a leader for the entire hemisphere. Its early efforts in this direction--notably its initiation in the 1820s of the first Pan-American Conference--soon languished, however, as the unequal growth between the two countries took its toll. By the turn of the century, after years of destructive civil war, Colombia had slipped far behind its northern neighbor militarily, economically, and politically. The United States, meanwhile, had emerged as a great power, and the first major manifestation of the two countries' divergence came with the U.S.-supported secession of Panama in 1903--an event that deeply shocked Colombians and tainted their view of the United States for subsequent generations. During the twentieth century, Randall explains, a tension in Colombian politics and culture has persisted between those who advocate an independent, even antagonistic, stance toward the United States and those who propound a policy of realism that accepts Colombia's place as a middle, regional power within the U.S. orbit. For its part, the United States has continually failed to realize that Colombians, with their European intellectual heritage stretching back four hundred years, do not see themselves as an insignificant Third World nation. The result has been an often strained relationship, which Randall traces through two world wars, economic booms and depressions, the Cold War, and, finally, the present-day guerrilla conflicts and drug trade controversies. Drawing on archival sources in both countries, many previously unused, this book is the first comprehensive overview in more than fifty years of the U.S.-Colombian relationship.
Treats in concise and objective manner the dominant historical, social, political, economic, and national security aspects of contemporary Colombia. Chapter bibliographies appear at the end of the book.
While 1998 marked the 100th anniversary of the United States' invasion and takeover of Puerto Rico, it wasn't until 1999 that the island's political movements reappeared on the radar screen of the American people. That year, two major developments occurred that transformed the relationship between Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.: the limited clemency granted by then-President Clinton to eleven Puerto Rican Nationalists, and the death of Puerto Rican civilian security guard David Sanes, killed by missile fragments from U.S. naval bombing tests on the island municipality of Vieques. How does Vieques fit into the political future of Puerto Rico? While anti-Navy protesters are careful not to mix the island's political status options with their battle against the Navy, it is important to understand the role Washington has played in shaping Puerto Rico's current reality and how it has allowed the Navy to use Vieques as a bombing range for 60 years. It also helps one begin to predict what is the future of Puerto Rico. Is it to be a colony? Fifty-first state of the United States? Sovereign nation? In Islands of Resistance, Mario A. Murillo approaches these questions by examining how Puerto Rican politics have been shaped as much by 100 years of U.S. economic, military, and cultural domination of the territory, as by the enduring grassroots resistance of the Puerto Rican people. Islands of Resistance puts the contemporary situation in Puerto Rico into an historic context that will help people understand what is at stake in Vieques, not only for Viequenses, but for Puerto Ricans, both on the island and in the diaspora.
Economic ties with the United States were important to Colombia even in the early twentieth century, as the U.S. was the major market for coffee, Colombia's leading export and source of revenue. A 1940 trade agreement strengthened pre - World War II relations between Bogota and Washington, and Colombia's position as a close ally of the United States became evident during World War II, although its commitment to the Allied cause did not include troop participation. Colombia's strategic proximity to the Caribbean and the Panama Canal and its pro-American stance within the region were helpful to the Allied nations.Though its relations with the United States were strained during the late 1940s and throughout most of the 1950s due to the pro-Catholic Conservative government's persecution of the nation's few Protestants, Colombia's partnership with the United States prompted it to contribute troops to the UN peacekeeping force during the Korean War (1950-53). Colombia also provided the only Latin American troops to the UN Emergency Force in the Suez conflict (1956-58).Filling a gap in the available literature on U.S. relations with less developed countries, author Bradley Coleman provides new research on the development of the U. S.-Colombian alliance that will serve as an invaluable resource for scholars of U.S. and Latin American diplomacy.
Since the late 1990s, the United States has funneled billions of dollars in aid to Colombia, ostensibly to combat the illicit drug trade and State Department-designated terrorist groups. The result has been a spiral of violence that continues to take lives and destabilize Colombian society. This book asks an obvious question: are the official reasons given for the wars on drugs and terror in Colombia plausible, or are there other, deeper factors at work? Scholars Villar and Cottle suggest that the answers lie in a close examination of the cocaine trade, particularly its class dimensions. Their analysis reveals that this trade has fueled extensive economic growth and led to the development of a "narco-state" under the control of a "narco-bourgeoisie" which is not interested in eradicating cocaine but in gaining a monopoly over its production. The principal target of this effort is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who challenge that monopoly as well as the very existence of the Colombian state. Meanwhile, U.S. business interests likewise gain from the cocaine trade and seek to maintain a dominant, imperialist relationship with their most important client state in Latin America. Suffering the brutal consequences, as always, are the peasants and workers of Colombia. This revelatory book punctures the official propaganda and shows the class war underpinning the politics of the Colombian cocaine trade.
In Masters of War, Clara Nieto adeptly presents the parallel histories of the countries of Latin America, histories that are intertwined, each reflecting the United States’ "coherent policy of intervention" set into motion by the Monroe Doctrine. As the value of this continued policy comes increasingly into question, Nieto argues for the need to evaluate the alarming precedent set in Latin America: the institution of client dictatorships, the roles played by the interests of U.S. corporations, the enormous tolls taken on civilian populations, and the irreversible disruption of regional stability. Drawing from an impressive array of documents and sources as well as from her unique first-hand insights as a participant in crucial meetings and negotiations in the region from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, Nieto chronicles the Cuban Revolution, the CIA-sponsored coup against popularly elected President Allende in Chile, the U.S. invasions of Panama and Grenada, U.S. support for the cultivation and training of paramilitary death squads in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Colombia, as well as similarly severe but less well-known situations in other countries such as Uruguay, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Honduras, and Guatemala. Masters of War offers, from an informed perspective, perhaps for the first time, a distanced, objective analysis of recent Latin American history. Clara Nieto’s depth of knowledge and understanding is an invaluable resource at a time when the media is seen as unapologetically aligned with the interests of major corporations and policymakers, and the American public has reached a new height of apprehension regarding the intentions behind and consequences of its government’s policies.
