Imperialism, Colombia’s massacres, and what you can do about it
The lack of outrage in the Western press about the serious human rights abuses in Colombia is not surprising but an all-too-common display of hypocrisy. For decades, the United States has supported consecutive right-wing administrations in Colombia which permit multinational corporations to exploit cheap labour in the country. Since the start of Colombia’s armed communist insurgency around fifty years ago, the US has dug its imperial talons even deeper into Colombia’s internal affairs — from leading an operation known as Plan Lazo to crush peasant uprisings in the 1960s to providing increasingly overt and extensive funding of the Colombian military in more recent decades.
Although Colombia has one of the highest rates of extrajudicial killings in the world, liberal and conservative media outlets consistently turn a blind eye to the pervasive violence experienced by people in the South American nation. This year alone at least 223 social leaders have been massacred for their political beliefs. To the Western press, human rights are not a matter of fulfilling obligations society has to all people, but a weapon in the war of information used to turn public opinion against its enemies and towards its allies — including the Colombian government.
Since August, a particularly intense wave of massacres (defined as killings of three or more people in a single attack) has hit Colombia. On Friday, August 21, a week which saw five massacres occur across the country ended tragically with three massacres in one day. Many of these massacres are taking place in areas where the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and other leftist guerillas used to hold power, where a power vacuum has developed after the 2016 peace deal.
The assassinations of social leaders, combined with the recent violent police murder of Javier Ordóñez, sparked protests in September which left at least 13 dead after the use of lethal force by police — 13 more than were killed during the widely covered Hong Kong protests. As has been highlighted repeatedly, Western mainstream media is selectively humanitarian in the sense that they apply ‘international’ pressure on governments only when it is in their region’s economic or geopolitical interest. The Colombian state, a long-standing ally of the West, does not receive such pressure. Rather, despite the indisputable and verified evidence of systematic state killings of social and political leaders, and more recently of students and young protestors or even bystanders, is reported as an ambiguous ‘surge of mass killings’. In other words, they give the West, and the rest of the world, a sterile and unimpassioned account of what would amount to genocide if it were taking place in a rival country.
If we home in on what’s been happening since August alone we find that there’s a clear pattern of young people who are working-class, Black, Indigenous, and of mixed descent, being massacred. Western reporting on these massacres often involves implicating left-wing armed groups, the favoured boogeyman of the Colombian state. The preliminary investigations into the recent massacres, however, uncover a truth that is too hard a pill for Western society to swallow because of the complicity that it would entail.
Right-wing paramilitary groups, with verifiable links to the state, are said to be consolidating their power over a large part of the rural territory now that left-wing armed groups have demobilised due to the 2016 peace-deal. Social and political leaders, especially students and young activists, in these rural areas are seen as a real threat to this expansion by the state-sponsored terrorists and are, therefore, targeted incessantly.
In general, the Western world has conveniently regarded Colombia as either a mere cocaine manufacturer for the world, as a naturally and inherently violent place, or more recently, as a fun and culturally vibrant place to go on vacation. Of course, all of these stereotypes are vacant of the proper historical and political context that is needed to understand what’s happening accurately. The more recent and growing stereotype among Westerners, Colombia as an attractive holiday or gap-year destination, is beginning to play a significant role in concealing the ongoing violence of the state on Colombian people, either through policy or bullets.
The Western world is not only committing an injustice by turning a blind eye to the terrorism of the state and state-sponsored groups, they are actively involved in this project. The West itself turns a blind eye to what is going on in Colombia because it often plays a role and benefits from this violence, transnational corporations (TNCs) being some of the biggest perpetrators. Colombia is rich in land, resources and most importantly, easily exploitable labour. Free market economic policies allow for transnational corporations to take advantage of basically non-existent labour laws, allowing for higher profit to be extracted from exploited workers. When people try to stand up for their land or demand basic rights they are met with harsh repression.
TNCs utilizing local military and police to protect their own economic interests is commonplace in the global south, and in Colombia, many companies have even gone so far as to contracting right-wing paramilitaries. Oil companies, such as British Petroleum, have been known to contract the military, as well as paramilitary forces, to protect pipelines and even intimidate or kill oil union workers, or those protesting environmental degradation. Agricultural industries, such as the palm oil industry, have been able to rapidly grow in the past two decades due to paramilitaries forcibly displacing peasants and farmers, selling this land back to the corporations.
In the 1980s Coca-Cola hired paramilitaries to intimidate and kill union workers. Canadian mining companies are infamous for dispossessing and destroying the land of campesinos and indigenous people all across Latin America, including Colombia. In 2017 Cosigo Resources Ltd attempted to convince an indigenous group in the protected nature reserve Yaigoje-Apaporis National Park to lift mining restrictions, and when they refused the company threatened to sue Colombia for 16.5 billion dollars.
The West's interests in maintaining their economic holdings within Colombia has resulted in not only exploitation of the land and people, but the deaths of tens of thousands. It is in their own interest to turn a blind eye, as they often play an active role in the violence and repression.
The U.S. military and government has a long history of working with the Colombian state in repressing its people, going back to Colombia's ‘independence’. The U.S. has funnelled money and resources into counter-insurgency programs in Colombia to protect their own political and economic interests. In the 1960s the U.S., to give a concrete example, sent research teams to the South American country and advised that the police be directly linked to counter-insurgency programs and also masterminded the Plan Lazo. This gave the army political and judicial power that was directly responsible for widespread state terror directed at civil society, an ideology that is still prevalent and materially harmful to this day.
Over the second half of the 20th century, the U.S. sent billions of dollars in military aid and resources to Colombia, with the underlying intent of fighting insurgency and maintaining a pro-U.S. government and free-market economic policies. However, when the fight against communism began to lose its legitimacy as a reason for interventionism they turned to the War on Drugs policy. It gave new legitimacy to a U.S. presence within Colombia that would allow them to funnel billions of dollars into the increased surveillance and militarization of the country, all for the purpose of ‘fighting narco-traffickers’.
However, since the War on Drugs has begun, drug production and exportation has increased over the years rather than decreased. It has been discovered that the military and government officials often have links to narcotrafficking, and U.S. and European banks are known to launder money for narcos. The U.S. has little interest in fighting narco-traffickers, but rather maintaining control over the Colombian state. Plan Colombia saw $6-9 billion go into the improvement of military tech, counter-insurgency intelligence, and the joint training of troops and police. Even ICE has played a role in the training of the Colombian Police force. Today Colombia is the second-largest recipient of military aid from the U.S. after Israel, meaning the U.S. directly supports the terror that the military inflicts upon the civilian population.
During the civil war, in an attempt to inflate numbers of insurgents killed and to receive more funding from the U.S., the army would kill civilians and dress them up in guerrilla uniforms to justify the killings. These cases, known as false positives, are believed to have victimised around 10,000 civilians, most of them vulnerable young people. These state-sponsored massacres continue today even after the peace agreement was enacted in 2016.
By financing and supporting the Colombian army, the U.S. is funding paramilitary groups by proxy. Often, senior Colombian military personnel have been found to have direct ties to paramilitary groups and their terrorist activities. One of many such instances is a massacre that occurred in Chengue, Sucre, in 2001, where paramilitaries removed dozens of people from their homes, individually crushed their heads with stones or sledgehammers, and set fire to the village as they left. The military had participated in blocking the village off so people couldn't flee, and even gave information to the paramilitaries beforehand.
Furthermore, Colombia is a strategic geopolitical ally for the U.S. military as it neighbours Venezuela. The U.S. has attempted to invade Venezuela many times to overthrow the government in hopes of crushing the Bolivarian revolution and has often worked with the Colombian Army in doing so. The U.S. turns a blind eye to the violence in Colombia as they utilize and strengthen the militarized state to crush emerging and existing radical and progressive movements within Colombia, and throughout Latin America, that threaten the U.S. empire and free-market capitalism.
The recent massacres are then linked back to capitalism and imperial domination from the North. So what can we do to bring an end to the cycle of violence in Colombia? By exposing the neglect of our situation in Western mainstream media we are not calling for Western society to come and save us. Instead, we want Westerners to understand that they have an active duty to put an end to the violent situation made possible by their governments and businesses.
Western society needs to force their elected governments to stop meddling in our affairs, halt their business and political partnerships with our ruling class, and put an immediate end to the funding and training of local military and paramilitaries.
Once the powerful capitalist-imperialist interests are dealt with, we argue that the only viable solution is a socialist worker’s state. The country’s workers will assume this role by exercising power through a representative government in which legislators are nominated by popular organizations such as trade unions, women’s organizations, and organizations which fight for the rights of racially oppressed groups.
Only a truly independent Colombia, with help from socialist allies, will win their centuries-long struggle for liberation.