State violence supporting the economic elite continued, but became much worse in the 1960s under the direction of the US military. Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, President of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights reports that in the 1960s, "during the Kennedy administration, the US "took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads. This "ushered in what is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine"not defense against an external enemy, but a way to make the military establishment the masters of the game"the right to combat the internal enemy"this could mean anyone, including human rights activists such as myself.
As Edward Herman, co-author of The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism explained in a previous interview with Upside Down World, US support for repressive governments in Colombia and throughout Latin America was, and still is, part of a general policy towards third world populations. Focusing largely on US support for the Latin American "National Security States, Herman and co-author Noam Chomsky argue that U.S. corporations purposefully support (and in many instances create) fascist terror states in order to create a favorable investment climate. In exchange for a cut of the action, local military police-states brutally repress their population when it attempts to assert basic human rights.
In the 1960s, the US and Colombian governments launched Plan Lazo, designed to target the "internal enemy. Hristov writes that "the military aid that was part of Plan Lazo (and all subsequent programs, including those in place today, such as the Patriot Plan) were given on the condition that Colombian forces would use terror and violence, since these formed a legitimate part of the overall anticommunist offensive. In 1966 the field manual US Army Counterinsurgency Forces specified that while antiguerrilla should not employ mass terror, selective terror against civilians was acceptable and was justified as a necessary response to the alleged terrorism committed by rebel forces.
Hristov asserts that while the US handled the "financial and ideological aspects of building and strengthening the SCA, locally the Colombian elites also played a key role. "It implemented many of the policies suggested by the US counterinsurgency manual in order to discipline the civilian population through measures such as press censorship, the suspension of civil rights (to permit arrest on mere suspicion), and the forced relocation of entire villages. President Guillermo Leon Valencia (1962-66) boosted the anticommunist campaign by declaring a state of siege whereby judicial and political powers were transferred to the military while the latter was freed from accountability to civilian authorities for its conduct.
With US financing and supervision, the Colombian armed forces have since become one of the most renowned human rights violators in the world. This despicable conduct eventually created significant local and international opposition, and under this pressure the SCA has been forced to adjust. In response, the responsibility for repression has shifted more towards paramilitaries, whose activities are officially independent of the government. In this situation, when paramilitaries target the "internal enemy, the same goal is accomplished as if the government itself did it, yet the government cannot be officially linked to the violence.
The Paramilitarization of Colombia
The size and strength of paramilitary death squads in Colombia has steadily increased since they were first established in the 1960s. According to Hristov, the paramilitaries are now responsible for about 80 percent of human rights violations in Colombia, compared to 16 percent by the rebel guerrillas. The paramilitaries' evolution, Hristov argues, is the result of "perhaps the most creative and intelligent effort by an elite-dominated state to counteract revolutionary processes. "The Colombian parastatal system represents neither a traditional centralized authoritarian regime, as those that existed in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, nor merely a collection of autonomous armed bands dispersed over rural areas, each ruling locally, as in Mexico. What we see in Colombia is a mutated SCA that has assumed a nonstate appearance.
The function of the paramilitaries in Colombia was explained well by Captain Gilberto Cardenas, former captain of the national police and former director of the Judicial Police Investigative and Intelligence Unit in the Uraba region. In 2002, testifying against the commander of the Seventeenth Brigade of the Colombian armed forces, Cardenas told representatives of the United Nations and Colombian authorities that "The paramilitaries were created by the Colombian government itself to do the dirty work, in other words, in order to kill all individuals who, according to the state and the police, are guerrillas. But in order to do that, the [the government] had to create illegal groups so that no one would suspect the government of Colombia and its military forces"members of the army and the police even patrol side by side with the paramilitaries.
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