_______________________________________________________________
 |
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/a_soldier_speaks/
 |
 |
 |  [Sorry for the language on this page -- it is the language
 |  of solider Stan Goff, and his testimony is very important,
 |  so I publish it here notwithstanding it's sometimes foul
 |  language. -- Leif Erlingsson]
 |
 |
 |  ``A liberal will tell you the system isn't working properly.
 |  I will tell you that the system is working exactly the way
 |  it's supposed to.
 |
 |  As an insider on active duty in the armed forces, I saw the
 |  deep dissonance between the official explanations for our
 |  policies and our actual practices: the murder of
 |  schoolteachers and nuns by our surrogates; decimations;
 |  systematic rape; the cultivation of terror.
 |
 |  I have concluded that the billions in profit and interest to
 |  be made in Colombia and neighboring nations has much more to
 |  do with the itch for stability than any concern about
 |  democracy or cocaine. After reflection on my two decades
 |  plus of service, I am convinced that I only served the
 |  richest one percent of my country.'' [ Stan Goff, Retired
 |  from the U.S. Army in February 1996, after serving in
 |  Vietnam, Guatemala, El Salvador, Grenada, Panama, Colombia,
 |  Peru, Venezuela, Honduras, Somalia and Haiti.  He lives in
 |  Raleigh, N.C.  http://consortiumnews.com/1999/122299a.html
 |  or below. ]
 |
 |  ``I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to defend some
 |  lousy investment of the bankers. We should fight only for
 |  the defense of our home and the Bill of Rights. War for any
 |  other reason is simply a racket.''  [ In 1935, two-time
 |  Medal of Honor winner, retired Gen. Smedley Butler, quoted
 |  by Stan Goff, Retired from the U.S. Army in February 1996,
 |  after serving in Vietnam, Guatemala, El Salvador, Grenada,
 |  Panama, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Honduras, Somalia and
 |  Haiti.  He lives in Raleigh, N.C. 
 |  http://consortiumnews.com/1999/122299a.html or below. ]
 |
 |   _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
 |
 |
 |  The Consortium
 |  Source:  http://consortiumnews.com/1999/122299a.html
 |
 |
 |  December 22, 1999
 |  Inside U.S. Counterinsurgency:
 |  A Soldier Speaks
 |
 |
 |  Editor's Note: Stan Goff served in the U.S. military for two
 |  decades, much of the time with Special Forces training Third
 |  World armies. His first-person account of these
 |  counterinsurgency projects comes as policy makers in
 |  Washington press for major increases in military aid to
 |  Colombia's government in its war with leftist guerrillas.
 |
 |
 |  By Stan Goff
 |
 |
 |  Tolemaida is hot. The whole Sumapaz River Valley is hotter
 |  than hell.
 |
 |  Steep, semi-arid, plenty of thorns and mosquitoes, it's the
 |  perfect place for the Lancero School, where the Colombian
 |  military runs its toughest course of training and
 |  assessment.
 |
 |  About 70 miles south of Bogota, Tolemaida is also home of
 |  Colombian Special Forces, kind of like the Fort Bragg of
 |  Colombia.
 |
 |  I'd been married for the second time for only 10 days on
 |  Oct. 22, 1992, when 7th Special Forces sent me there.
 |
 |  Bill Clinton was campaigning for the presidency against
 |  George Bush, and I remember the Delta guys who were billeted
 |  alongside us shrieking and carrying on when the election
 |  results came through. "That faggot lovin' draft dodger!
 |  Shit!"
 |
 |  Delta was there training a select group of Colombian
 |  soldiers for "close-quarter battle," which means fighting
 |  inside buildings during hostage situations and the like. We
 |  were training two battalions of Colombian Special Forces in
 |  night helicopter operations and counterinsurgency tactics.
 |
 |  Of course, we were there helping the Colombian army to
 |  defend democracy against leftist guerrillas who were the
 |  foes of democracy. It mattered not that only a tiny fraction
 |  of the population had the means to recruit and promote
 |  candidates or that terror stalked the population.
 |
 |  I'm not being cynical. I'm just awake now. It took a couple
 |  of decades.
 |
 |
 |  Growing up, I lived in a neighborhood where everyone worked
 |  in the same plant, McDonnell-Douglas, where F-4 Phantoms
 |  were built to provide close air support for the troops in
 |  Vietnam.
 |
 |  My dad and mom both riveted, working on the center fuselage
 |  assembly. I just understood that it was my duty to fight the
 |  godless collectivist menace of communism.
 |
 |  So, I joined the Army seven months after I squeaked through
 |  high school. In 1970, I volunteered for the airborne
 |  infantry and for Vietnam.
 |
 |  In the years that followed, I found out that I didn't know
 |  communism from cobblestones. All I saw in Vietnam was a race
 |  war being conducted by an invading army, and very poor
 |  people were taking the brunt of it.
 |
 |  I left the Army after my first hitch, but poverty coaxed me
 |  back in in 1977. Soon, I had stepped onto the slippery slope
 |  of a military career. But I didn't like garrison soldiering
 |  and I did like to travel.
 |
 |  So, it was inevitable that I ended up in Special Operations,
 |  first with the Rangers, later with Special Forces.
 |
 |  In 1980, I went to Panama. The fences there separated us
 |  from the ``Zonies'' -- the slum dwellers who lived in the
 |  Canal Zone. After that, I went to El Salvador, Guatemala and
 |  a host of other dirt-poor countries.
 |
 |  Over and over, the fact that we as a nation seemed to take
 |  sides with the rich against the poor started to penetrate --
 |  first my preconceptions, then my rationalizations, and
 |  finally, my consciousness.
 |
 |  Now I am the Viet Cong.
 |
 |
 |  1983:
 |
 |  The former Special Forces guy posing as a political officer
 |  didn't even try to hide his real job at the U.S. Embassy in
 |  Guatemala.
 |
 |  "You with the political section?" I asked. I knew what he
 |  did. I was trying to be discreet.
 |
 |  "I'm a fuckin' CIA agent," he responded.
 |
 |  The CIA man had adopted me out of friendship for a mutual
 |  acquaintance, one of my work associates with whom he had
 |  served in Vietnam. The CIA man told me where to get the best
 |  steak, the best ceviche, the best music, the best martinis.
 |  He liked martinis.
 |
 |  We stopped off one afternoon at the El Jaguar Bar in the
 |  lobby of the El Camino Hotel, a mile up Avenida de la
 |  Reforma from the U.S. Embassy. He drank eight martinis in
 |  the first hour.
 |
 |  The CIA man began spontaneously relating how he had
 |  participated in the execution of a successful ambush "up
 |  north," two weeks earlier.
 |
 |  "North" was in the Indian areas: Quiche and Peten, where
 |  government troops were waging a scorched-earth campaign
 |  against Mayans considered sympathetic to leftist guerrillas.
 |
 |  He was elated. "Best fuckin' thing I got to do since Nam."
 |
 |  "You're talkin' kinda loud," I reminded him, thinking this
 |  must be pretty sensitive stuff.
 |
 |  "Fuck them!" he shot a circumferential glare. "We own this
 |  motherfucker!" The other patrons looked down at their table
 |  tops. The CIA man was big and manifestly drunk.
 |
 |  I should have known better, but I mentioned a Mayan
 |  schoolteacher who had just been assassinated by the
 |  esquadrones de muertos. It had been in the newspapers. The
 |  teacher had worked for the Agency for International
 |  Development.
 |
 |  My point was that it made the United States look bad, when
 |  these loose cannons pulled stunts like that. The impression
 |  was left that the U.S. government tacitly approved of
 |  assassinations by continuing to support Guatemala's
 |  government.
 |
 |  "He was a communist," stated the CIA man, without even
 |  pausing to toss down his dozenth martini. His eyes were
 |  getting that weird, stony, not-quite-synchronized look.
 |
 |  So that's how it was. I never thought to thank him for
 |  peeling that next layer of innocence off my eyes.
 |
 |  I had to take the CIA man's car keys from him that night. He
 |  wanted to drive to some whorehouse in Zone 1.
 |
 |  When we left the bar, he couldn't find his car in the
 |  parking lot, so he pulled his pistol on the attendant and
 |  threatened to shoot him on the spot. He accused the
 |  attendant of being part of a car theft gang.
 |
 |  "I know these motherfuckers," he glared. The attendant was
 |  almost in tears, when I wrested the pistol from my
 |  colleague's hand.
 |
 |  We proceeded to find his car in the lot one block away.
 |  That's when he started talking about driving to his favorite
 |  bordello.
 |
 |  "Gimme the keys!" he bellowed, as I danced away from him.
 |
 |  "I can't."
 |
 |  "I'll kick your ass," he said.
 |
 |  I reached into my pocket and grabbed three coins. When he
 |  lunged at me again, I tossed the coins into a street drain
 |  with a conspicuous jingle.
 |
 |  "There's the keys," I said.
 |
 |  He peered myopically into the drain for a moment, then tried
 |  to train his eyes on me. I dodged his staggering assault
 |  like he was a child. He almost fell, and I found myself
 |  wondering how I could possibly carry him.
 |
 |  He turned abruptly, like he'd just forgotten something, and
 |  tottered quietly away. I dropped his keys off at the
 |  political section the next day, with a note explaining where
 |  his car was.
 |
 |
 |  Fred Chapin was the U.S. ambassador in Guatemala. He was
 |  famous for his ability to drink a bottle of Scotch and still
 |  give a lucid interview in fluent Spanish, before his
 |  bodyguards carried him up to his room at la residencia and
 |  poured him into bed.
 |
 |  Chapin was credited with a well-known quote in Foreign
 |  Service circles: "I only regret that I have but one liver to
 |  give for my country."
 |
 |  Embassies are collections of these idiosyncratic characters.
 |
 |  Mauricio, another one of these exotic individuals, was the
 |  chief Guatemalan investigator assigned to work with the
 |  Security Section at the embassy.
 |
 |  Dissipated to a fault, even the thugs on the bodyguard
 |  details gave him a wide berth. His reputation as a sadistic
 |  former death squad member was well known.
 |
 |  His history was on him, like an aura of impersonal decay. He
 |  made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. "If you need
 |  to find something out, just send Mauricio" was the
 |  provincial wisdom at Security.
 |
 |  Langhorn Motley, Reagan's special ambassador to Central
 |  America, came to Guatemala to see what was being done with
 |  U.S. money, other than aboriginal genocide and the
 |  elimination of Bolshevik school teachers, of course.
 |
 |  I was assigned as a member of his security for a trip to
 |  Nebaj, a tiny Indian hamlet near the Mexican border. We were
 |  going to inspect a hospital.
 |
 |  There were no roads into Nebaj, so a helicopter was
 |  coordinated. When we finally arrived in Nebaj, the pilot and
 |  crew chief were in an animated conversation, both referring
 |  again and again to the fuel gauge.
 |
 |  Out of the helicopter, we were escorted through the dirt
 |  streets to an open-bed 2 1/2-ton truck by a corpulent,
 |  European-looking Guatemalan lieutenant colonel. The
 |  villagers stood in silence as we passed.
 |
 |  Two small children, maybe three years old, burst into
 |  hysterical tears when I walked too near them with my CAR-15
 |  assault rifle. I tried not to speculate about their reaction
 |  or its antecedents.
 |
 |  The truck took us to a dusty stone foundation. Nothing more.
 |  No rooms, no walls, no nothing. This was the hospital.
 |  Motley turned to me and said, "This is a fuckin' white
 |  elephant."
 |
 |  Later, the lieutenant colonel sat us in a room at his
 |  headquarters and trotted in two "former guerrillas." One was
 |  a skinny old man.
 |
 |  The other was a pregnant woman, around 25 years old.
 |
 |  They told us dutifully that they had been reformed by their
 |  new-found understanding of the duplicity of the communists
 |  and by the humanitarian treatment they had received at the
 |  hands of the soldiers.
 |
 |  It was a flat-eyed, canned recital, but it seemed to please
 |  the lieutenant colonel who sat there with a benevolent
 |  half-smile, glancing from them to us and back, judging their
 |  performance, assessing our reaction.
 |
 |  The skin of the two demonstration Indians almost moved from
 |  underneath with an arid, copper-tongued terror. The whole
 |  place smelled like murder to me.
 |
 |  Like murder.
 |
 |
 |  1985:
 |
 |  Reporters in El Salvador tended to hang out at the pool in
 |  the Camino Real Hotel, with transistor radios pressed to
 |  their ears.
 |
 |  I was chatting up a member of the press corps one day,
 |  having lunch at the Camino. Around 30, she worked for the
 |  Chicago Tribune.
 |
 |  She was just terribly excited because she had been allowed
 |  aboard a helicopter the week before, that flew into Morazan,
 |  a stronghold of leftist guerrillas. She got to see some
 |  bang-bang and was eternally grateful to the Embassy for
 |  arranging it for her.
 |
 |  Would I mind, she asked, taking her out for coffee or a
 |  drink somewhere in the barrios sometime? She would never
 |  think of doing it alone.
 |
 |  I was disillusioned. With her anemic weariness, she
 |  annihilated my concept of reporters as eccentric fearless
 |  old salts, obsessed with getting at the real story.
 |
 |  Bruce Hazelwood was a member of the Milgroup at the U.S.
 |  Embassy, like me a former member of the counter-terrorist
 |  unit at Fort Bragg. Hazelwood oversaw training management in
 |  the Estado Mayor, army headquarters.
 |
 |  Over the past five years, he had earned an enviable
 |  reputation as a productive liaison with the Salvadoran
 |  military. He told me off the cuff once that his biggest
 |  problem was getting the officers to quit stealing.
 |
 |  Good-looking, strawberry blonde, freckled, charming,
 |  Hazelwood also was a favorite of the young women with the
 |  press corps.
 |
 |  I went with him and an Embassy entourage to visit an
 |  orphanage at Sonsonate. The women from the press pool
 |  absolutely doted on him. He rewarded them with tons of
 |  mischievous magnetism.
 |
 |  Billy Zumwalt, also with the Milgroup, a fellow with
 |  Elvis-like looks, did the same thing at a party. The women
 |  from the press would skin up alongside him, asking how he
 |  thought progress was coming with the human rights situation.
 |  He would ask them how it seemed to them.
 |
 |  Well, they'd say, there were only a few battlefield
 |  executions of prisoners still taking place, according to
 |  rumors, but they'd heard nothing else. We can't expect them
 |  to come around overnight, now, can we?
 |
 |  Would you like to go dancing at an all night club later? You
 |  know where one is? I know where they all are, he'd tell
 |  them.
 |
 |  Zumwalt told me at a bar once that he was training the
 |  finest right-wing death squads in the world.
 |
 |
 |  The reporters at the Camino Real hired Salvadoran rich kids
 |  as informants and factotums. It was very important that they
 |  be educated, English-speaking kids, 20 to 25 years old, who
 |  could keep the reporters abreast of rumors and happenings in
 |  the capital.
 |
 |  But the rich kids were as far from the lives of average
 |  Salvadorans as were most of the reporters.
 |
 |  In the street, I saw an old woman dragging herself down the
 |  sidewalk with a gangrenous leg, a crazy man shrivelled in a
 |  corner, bone-skinny kids who played music for coins with a
 |  pipe and a stick.
 |
 |  On the bus one day in downtown San Salvador, a blind man
 |  came begging, and people who could ill afford it gave him a
 |  coin.
 |
 |  These people were callused, very modestly dressed, with
 |  Indian still in their cheeks.
 |
 |  To the slick, manicured, round-eyed, well-to-do, the poor
 |  and the beggars were invisible, as invisible as the
 |  blackened carboneros, the worm-glutted market babies, the
 |  brooding teens with raggedy clothes, prominent ribs and red
 |  eyes glaring out of the spotty shade on street corners.
 |
 |  They have to be invisible so they can be ignored. They have
 |  to be sub-human so they can be killed.
 |
 |  I was reminded of the goats at the Special Forces Medical
 |  Lab. When I was training to be a medic, we used goats as
 |  "patient models."
 |
 |  The goats would be wounded for trauma training, shot for
 |  surgical training, and euthanized over time by the hundreds
 |  for each 14-week class.
 |
 |  Nearly every student upon arrival would begin expressing his
 |  antipathy for the caprine breed. "A goat is a dumb creature,
 |  hard-headed, homely," we'd say.
 |
 |  A few acknowledged what the program was actually doing
 |  without seeking these comfortable rationalizations. A few
 |  even became attached to the animals and grew more depressed
 |  with each day.
 |
 |  But most required the anti-caprine ideology to sustain their
 |  activity.
 |
 |
 |  1991:
 |
 |  As a member of 7th Special Forces, I went to Peru in 1991.
 |  The reasons we went there were manifold and layered, as are
 |  many of our rationales for military activity.
 |
 |  We were committed, as a matter of policy, to encouraging
 |  something called IDAD for Peru. That means Internal
 |  Development and Defense.
 |
 |  We were involved in a nominal partnership with Peru in the
 |  "war on drugs." Peru was in our "area of operational
 |  responsibility," and we (our "A" Detachment) were performing
 |  a DFT, meaning a Deployment for Training.
 |
 |  So, we went to Peru to assist in their internal development
 |  and defense, to improve their "counter-drug" capabilities,
 |  and to train ourselves to better train others in our "target
 |  language," Spanish.
 |
 |  Those were the official reasons. No briefing mentioned
 |  another part of the mission: unofficial wars on indigenous
 |  populations.
 |
 |  The course of training we developed for the Peruvians was
 |  basic counterinsurgency. Drugs were never discussed with the
 |  Peruvian officers. It was a sensitive issue -- if you get my
 |  drift.
 |
 |  We were quartered in an ammunition factory outside the town
 |  of Huaichipa, for the first few weeks. Later, we moved into
 |  DIFE, the Peruvian Special Forces complex at the edge of
 |  Barranco district in Lima.
 |
 |  During the middle of the mission, we camped at the edge of
 |  an Indian village called Santiago de Tuna in the sierra four
 |  hours out of the capital.
 |
 |  Tuna is the Spanish word for prickly pear cactus fruit.
 |  Blessed with Cactus Fruit would be the direct translation.
 |  Local Indians did bring us two sacks full of cactus fruit,
 |  which was delicious and which kept everyone regular.
 |
 |  We became very chummy with the Peruvian officers, some of
 |  whom were easy-going fellows, and some of whom were
 |  aggressively macho. They stuffed us full of anticuchos
 |  (spicy, charbroiled beef heart) and beer every night.
 |
 |  Sometimes the combat veterans would get very drunk and spit
 |  all over us as they relived combat. One major couldn't shut
 |  up about how many people he had killed, and how the sierra
 |  was a land for real men.
 |
 |  A lot of drinking went on. Beer with the officers and
 |  soldiers. Cocktails in the bars; pisco with the Indians, who
 |  the soldiers tried to run off because they were considered a
 |  security risk.
 |
 |  One Indian man, in particular, toothless and dissipated, his
 |  blood-red eyes swimming with intoxication, astonished me
 |  with his knowledge of North American Indian history. He even
 |  knew the years of several key battles in our war of
 |  annihilation.
 |
 |  Geronimo was a great man, he said. A great medicine man.
 |  Great warrior. A lover of the land.
 |
 |  A Peruvian captain said a strange thing to me, as we walked
 |  past an Indian cemetery during the gut-check forced march
 |  out of Santiago de Tuna.
 |
 |  "Aqui hay los indios amigos." Here are the friendly Indians.
 |  He opened his hand toward the little acre of graves.
 |
 |
 |  1992:
 |
 |  When I was training Colombian Special Forces in Tolemaida in
 |  1992, my team was there ostensibly to aid the
 |  counter-narcotics effort.
 |
 |  We were giving military forces training in infantry
 |  counterinsurgency doctrine. We knew perfectly well, as did
 |  the host-nation commanders, that narcotics was a flimsy
 |  cover story for beefing up the capacity of armed forces who
 |  had lost the confidence of the population through years of
 |  abuse. The army also had suffered humiliating setbacks in
 |  the field against the guerrillas.
 |
 |  But I was growing accustomed to the lies. They were the
 |  currency of our foreign policy. Drugs my ass!
 |
 |
 |  Today:
 |
 |  Drug czar Barry McCaffrey and Defense Secretary William
 |  Cohen are arguing for massive expansion of military aid to
 |  Colombia.
 |
 |  Already, Colombia is the third largest recipient of U. S.
 |  military aid in the world, jumping from $85.7 million in
 |  1997 to $289 million last fiscal year. Press accounts say
 |  about 300 American military personnel and agents are in
 |  Colombia at any one time.
 |
 |  Now, the Clinton administration is seeking $1 billion over
 |  the next two years. The Republican-controlled Congress wants
 |  even more, $1.5 billion, including 41 Blackhawk helicopters
 |  and a new intelligence center.
 |
 |  The State Department claims the widened assistance is needed
 |  to fight "an explosion of coca plantations." The solution,
 |  according to the State Department, is a 950-man
 |  "counter-narcotics" battalion.
 |
 |  But the request is strangely coincident with the recent
 |  military advances of Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionario
 |  Colombiano (FARC), the leftist guerrillas who already
 |  control 40 percent of the countryside. [For details on
 |  FARC's history and goals, see iF Magazine, July-August
 |  1999.]
 |
 |  In the United States, there is a different kind of
 |  preparation afoot: to prepare the American people for
 |  another round of intervention.
 |
 |  McCaffrey -- not coincidentally the former commander of
 |  Southcom, the Theater Command for the U.S. armed forces in
 |  Latin America -- is "admitting" that the lines between
 |  counter-narcotics and counterinsurgency are "beginning to
 |  blur" in Colombia.
 |
 |  The reason? The guerrillas are involved in drug trafficking,
 |  a ubiquitous claim that it is repeated uncritically in the
 |  press. There is no differentiation between the FARC and a
 |  handful of less significant groups, nor is there any
 |  apparent preoccupation with citing precise evidence.
 |
 |  When this construct first began to gain wide currency,
 |  former U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Miles Frechette pointed
 |  out that there was no clear evidence to support the claims.
 |  His statement was soon forgotten.
 |
 |  We were to be prepared.
 |
 |
 |  In Colombia, it is well known that those who profit the most
 |  from the drug trade are members of the armed forces, the
 |  police, government officials, and the "big businessmen" of
 |  the urban centers.
 |
 |  The FARC taxes coca, a far cry from trafficking. The FARC
 |  also taxes gas, peanuts and furniture.
 |
 |  Coca also is the only crop left that keeps the campesinos'
 |  heads above water. The peasant who grows standard crops will
 |  have an average annual income of around $250 a year. With
 |  coca, they can feed a family on $2,000 a year. These are not
 |  robber barons.
 |
 |  They are not getting rich.
 |
 |  Once the coca is processed, a kilo fetches about $2,000 in
 |  Colombia. Precautions, payoffs and the first profits bring
 |  the price to $5,500 a kilo by the time it reaches the first
 |  gringo handler.
 |
 |  The gringo sells that kilo, now ready for U.S. retail, for
 |  around $20,000. On the street in the United States, that
 |  will break out to $60,000. There are some high rollers at
 |  the end of the Colombian chain, but the real operators are
 |  the Americans.
 |
 |  Still, drugs can fill in for the World Communist Conspiracy
 |  only so far. Drugs alone won't justify this vast military
 |  build-up. For that, we also must believe we are defending
 |  democracy and protecting economic reform.
 |
 |  [For more background on Colombia, see Human Right Watch's
 |  Colombia's Killer Networks: The Military-Paramilitary
 |  Partnership and the United States, November 1996.]
 |
 |  The rationales have become more sophisticated since I was in
 |  Guatemala in 1983, way more sophisticated than the blunt
 |  instrument of open war in Vietnam.
 |
 |  Democracy wasn't the goal then. We were stopping communists.
 |  Drugs are a great rationale, too. But with the FARC, we can
 |  have our drug war and our war against communists.
 |
 |  Yet, behind the democratic facade in Colombia are the most
 |  egregious and systematic human rights violations in this
 |  hemisphere. Except in the 40 percent of the country where
 |  the FARC holds sway, right-wing paramilitaries, supported
 |  and coordinated by the official security forces, are
 |  involved in a process that would have made Roberto
 |  D'Abuisson or Lucas Garcia or Rios Montt proud: torture,
 |  public decapitations, massacres, rape-murder, destruction of
 |  land and livestock, forced dislocations. Favored targets
 |  have been community and union leaders, political opponents,
 |  and their families.
 |
 |  This July, Commander of the Colombian Army, Jorge Enrique
 |  Mora Rangel intervened in the Colombian judicial process to
 |  protect the most powerful paramilitary chief in Colombia,
 |  Carlos Castano, from prosecution for a series of massacres.
 |  Castano's organization is networked for intelligence and
 |  operations directly with the security forces.
 |
 |  That network was organized and trained in 1991, under the
 |  tutelage of the U.S. Defense Department and the CIA. This
 |  was accomplished under a Colombian military intelligence
 |  integration plan called Order 200-05/91.
 |
 |  The cozy relationship between the Colombian army and Castano
 |  raises another little problem for the drug-war rationale.
 |  Castano is a known drug lord. Not someone who taxes coca
 |  growers, but a drug lord.
 |
 |  There is also the U.S. government's troubling history of
 |  fighting with -- not against -- drug traffickers. Indeed,
 |  the CIA seems to have an irresistible affinity for drug
 |  lords.
 |
 |  The Tibetan contras trained by the CIA in the 50's became
 |  the masters of the Golden Triangle heroin empires. In
 |  Vietnam and Cambodia, the CIA worked hand in glove with
 |  opium traffickers.
 |
 |  The contra war in Nicaragua was financed, in part, with drug
 |  profits. The CIA's Afghan-Pakistani axis employed in the war
 |  against the Soviets was permeated with drug traffickers.
 |  Most recently, there were the heroin traffickers of the
 |  Kosovo Liberation Army.
 |
 |  It might make more sense for McCaffrey to find $1 billion
 |  dollars to declare war on the CIA.
 |
 |
 |  I was in Guatemala in 1983 for the last coup. In 1985, I was
 |  in El Salvador; 1991, Peru; 1992, Colombia.
 |
 |  People don't generally hear from retired Special Forces
 |  soldiers. But people need to hear the facts from someone who
 |  can't be called an effete liberal who never "served" his
 |  country.
 |
 |  A liberal will tell you the system isn't working properly. I
 |  will tell you that the system is working exactly the way
 |  it's supposed to.
 |
 |  As an insider on active duty in the armed forces, I saw the
 |  deep dissonance between the official explanations for our
 |  policies and our actual practices: the murder of
 |  schoolteachers and nuns by our surrogates; decimations;
 |  systematic rape; the cultivation of terror.
 |
 |  I have concluded that the billions in profit and interest to
 |  be made in Colombia and neighboring nations has much more to
 |  do with the itch for stability than any concern about
 |  democracy or cocaine. After reflection on my two decades
 |  plus of service, I am convinced that I only served the
 |  richest one percent of my country.
 |
 |  In every country where I worked, poor people's poverty built
 |  and maintained the wealth of the rich. Sometimes directly,
 |  as labor; sometimes indirectly, when people made fortunes in
 |  the armed security business, which is needed wherever there
 |  is so much misery.
 |
 |  Often the companies that need protecting are American.
 |  Chiquita is a spiffed up version of United Fruit, the
 |  company that pressed the United States for the coup against
 |  Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Pepsi was there for Pinochet in
 |  Chile in 1973.
 |
 |  But the top interest now is financial. The United States is
 |  the dominant force in the dominant lending institutions of
 |  the world: the World Bank and the International Monetary
 |  Fund.
 |
 |  What the United States exports, more than anything else, is
 |  credit. So the money is made from squeezing the interest out
 |  of those loans.
 |
 |  What that means in the Third World is that the economic
 |  elites borrow the money, with the government as their front,
 |  then bleed the population to pay the interest. That's done
 |  through higher more regressive taxes, by cutting social
 |  services, by selling off public assets, by co-opting or
 |  crushing labor unions, and so forth.
 |
 |  If the governments don't do enough, Washington pressures
 |  them to do more. At home, the American people are told that
 |  these countries need "structural adjustment" and "economic
 |  reform," when the reality is that U.S. foreign policy often
 |  is being conducted on behalf of loan sharks.
 |
 |  The big investors and the big lenders also are the big
 |  contributors to political campaigns in this country, for
 |  both Republicans and Democrats. The press, which is run by a
 |  handful of giant corporations, somberly repeats this
 |  rationale again and again, ``economic reform and
 |  democracy.''
 |
 |  Pretty soon, just to sound like we're not totally out of
 |  touch with current events, we catch ourselves saying, yeah
 |  ... Colombia, or Venezuela, or Russia, or Haiti, or South
 |  Africa, or whomever ... they need
 |  "economic-reform-and-democracy."
 |
 |
 |  Though phrased differently, this argument is not new. In
 |  1935, two-time Medal of Honor winner, retired Gen. Smedley
 |  Butler accused major New York investment banks of using the
 |  U.S. Marines as ``racketeers'' and ``gangsters'' to exploit
 |  financially the peasants of Nicaragua.
 |
 |  Later, Butler stated: ``The trouble is that when American
 |  dollars earn only six percent over here, they get restless
 |  and go overseas to get 100 percent. The flag follows the
 |  dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
 |
 |  ``I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to defend some
 |  lousy investment of the bankers. We should fight only for
 |  the defense of our home and the Bill of Rights. War for any
 |  other reason is simply a racket.
 |
 |  ``There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the
 |  military gang is blind to. It had its `finger men' to point
 |  out enemies, its `muscle men' to destroy enemies, its `brain
 |  men' to plan war preparations and a `Big
 |  Boss'-supernationalistic capitalism,'' Butler continued.
 |
 |  ``I spent 33 years and four months in active military
 |  service in the Marines. I helped make Tampico, Mexico, safe
 |  for the American oil interests in 1914; Cuba and Haiti safe
 |  for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue; helped
 |  purify Nicaragua for the International banking house of
 |  Baron Broches in 1909-1912; helped save the sugar interests
 |  in the Dominican Republic; and in China helped to see that
 |  Standard Oil went its way unmolested. War is a racket.''
 |
 |  Like Gen. Butler, I came to my conclusions through years of
 |  personal experience and through the gradual absorption of
 |  hard evidence that I saw all around me, not just in one
 |  country, but in country after country.
 |
 |  I am finally really serving my country, right now, telling
 |  you this. You do not want some things done in your name.
 |
 |
 |
 |  Stan Goff retired from the U.S. Army in February 1996, after
 |  serving in Vietnam, Guatemala, El Salvador, Grenada, Panama,
 |  Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Honduras, Somalia and Haiti. He
 |  lives in Raleigh, N.C.
 |
 |
 |
 |  (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this
 |  material is distributed without profit to those who have
 |  expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
 |  information for research and educational purposes.)
 |______________________________________________________________