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.

 

During the Cold War the US intervened in more states in Latin America than in any other continent, with US-sponsored counter-insurgency (CI) the primary means of US coercive statecraft. US planners argued that CI support for allied states was designed to contain the influence of the Soviet Union through the destruction of left-wing armed insurgencies that were portrayed as externally sponsored instances of Soviet expansionism. Throughout this period Colombia remained one of the largest recipients of US CI funding and training designed to destroy the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a rebel insurgency movement. The FARC were portrayed as Soviet-backed guerrillas, and as a threat to the pro-US Colombian state. During these years of support, the Colombian military carried out widespread human rights abuses. Although these abuses were not publicly approved, they were considered a necessary evil required to prevent the alleged devastating consequences to US security should a potentially pro-Soviet state cometo power in Latin America. George Kennan, the architect of the USA’s Cold War grand strategy of containment, explained that in dealing with communism in Latin America the final answer ‘may be an unpleasant one’ but the USA ‘should not hesitate before police repression by the local government’. Kennan considered this repression not only to be strategically necessary but also to be ethically correct, as ‘the Communists are essentially traitors’. He continued, it ‘is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists’.