The U.S. Needs to Enforce Its Own Laws on Foreign Military Aid to Colombia

Colombia’s ongoing national strike has shown no sign of slowing down. This mass movement, which began on April 28 in direct response to unpopular right-wing president Iván Duque’s “Sustainable Solidarity Bill”, has since expanded to address the many consequences resulting from decades of corrupt U.S.-backed governments. Duque’s neoliberal austerity measure would have disproportionately affected working and middle-class families by raising taxes on food and incomes to fund the country’s COVID-19 response. While the tax bill was withdrawn on May 2 after five days of massive popular protest, the strike’s leadership—composed of Colombian labor unions, students, and Afro-Colombian and rural indigenous collectives, among others—were not satisfied with this initial victory. The country’s contracting economy, disastrous COVID-19 response, and booming social and wealth inequality has inspired additional demands, including free education, a fully functioning health system with broad access to COVID-19 vaccines, and an equitable governmental response to inflated prices of basic goods and chronic unemployment.

 In addition, activists demand the right to protest and organize without being disappeared or killed by Colombian security forces. Central to this demand is broad popular support for the dismantling of the Mobile Anti-Disturbances Squadron, or ESMAD, a “riot control” national police unit commanded by the Colombian military. The unit is responsible for 34 recorded murders between its inception in 1999 and September 2020, including the massacre of between 8 and 16 people in Tumaco on October 5, 2017. More recently, on September 9, 2020, Colombia’s national Human Rights Day, ESMAD was recorded killing lawyer and taxi driver Javier Ordoñez, resulting in days of country-wide protests met with violent suppression by ESMAD and the Colombian National Police; approximately 11 more were killed, and 400 injured. According to Indepaz, a Colombian human rights institute, these reactionary militarized police units were responsible for the majority of 70 recorded civilian deaths—many of whom were minors—between April 28 and June 12. 

 The United States exported ESMAD’s policing model to Colombia as part of “Plan Colombia”, the multi-billion dollar military assistance program anchoring the U.S. “War on Drugs” campaign in Latin America. The militarization of the drug war gained popularity, in large part, due to Senator Joe Biden’s enthusiastic endorsement: In 1996, Biden went on national television to remind the American people that “I’m the guy that suggested in the first national drug strategy that we get the military involved.” Biden pushed for Plan Colombia, the international expansion of the drug war, two months before it was first implemented by President Bill Clinton in July 2000. However, the “War on Drugs” label was used as cover to downplay U.S. interventionism and escalate Colombia’s counterinsurgency campaign against revolutionary left-wing guerillas, following more overt Cold War military assistance provided to U.S.-backed governments committing atrocities in Guatemala and El Salvador. This flood of cash into the Colombian military was supplemented by billions of additional dollars in “black budget” funding from the CIA used to torture and kill Colombian dissidents.

In addition to military funding through Plan Colombia, the United States’ training of more than 5,000 Colombian soldiers at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas between 1999 and 2012 helped undermine the 2002 peace negotiations and spurred almost daily massacres during this period. However, previous U.S. military involvement in Colombian affairs helped set the groundwork. In 1962, the Yarborough Report, named after U.S. General William Yarborough, proposed that the Colombian state organize paramilitary groups to combat a growing communist threat rooted in the economically and politically marginalized rural peasant class. In 1964, the notorious FARC guerilla organization was established in response to brutal repression from paramilitary and security forces receiving intelligence from the U.S.-created Administrative Department of Security (DAS), a mirror image of the FBI. Following the peace agreement between the FARC and President Belisario Betancur in 1985, demobilized guerillas, communists, and other left-wing groups attempted to secure political participation through the formation of the Unión Patriótica party (UP). What followed was more than a decade of politicide in which more than 4,000 UP politicians and supporters were murdered or disappeared. To this day, former UP members continue to be assassinated.    

Of the more than 2,000 massacres committed in Colombia since 1980, more than two-thirds were orchestrated by far-right militias with ties to the armed forces or by the armed forces themselves. During the 2002-2010 presidency of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, the Colombian military received $6 billion through Plan Colombia. These funds helped Uribe carry out years of extrajudicial murders and massacres that resulted in over 10,000 civilian deaths. This atrocity, known as the “False Positives Scandal,” saw government-controlled forces murder peasants and frame their victims as members of the FARC to justify more security funding from the United States. (U.S. funding was undeterred by knowledge of Uribe’s ties to drug cartels and right-wing paramilitary groups, including campaign funding by founders of the Medellín drug cartel and the use of a Uribe family ranch as a staging ground for death squads.)  

Unfortunately, the negotiation of peace has repeatedly proven to be insufficient.  Since the signing of the 2016 Peace Accords between the FARC and the Colombian government, women, marginalized ethnic groups, and activists have continued to be disproportionately targeted by state-sanctioned violence. Between October 2016 and July 2020, 971 social leaders were murdered: the victims included 250 indigenous Colombians, 131 women, 71 Afro-Colombians, and 6 environmental activists, making Colombia the most dangerous country in the world for human rights defenders. This blatant violation of the peace accords has ensured that Colombia’s 7 million internally displaced people remain uprooted and dispossessed. Under the current presidency of Duque, a protégé of Uribe and strong opponent of the 2016 Peace Accords, egregious human rights violations continue with the embrace of U.S. military assistance.

 By 2018, the first year of the Duque administration, ESMAD had expanded from 19 members to 3,580 members. The expansion of ESMAD and increased militarization of Colombian police has not only aided the right-wing political elite in their suppression of popular protest, but has also enriched U.S. and Israeli weapons manufacturers and private security firms. The majority of ESMAD’s weaponry is produced by Pennsylvania-based company Combined Systems, Inc., while the Israeli Tavor rifle has been spotted among ESMAD and Colombian National Police. Duque has continued Colombia’s secretive military relationship with Israel by securing Israeli military instructors to train Colombian Special Forces; Hugo Chávez called Colombia the “Israel of Latin America,” referring to both countries’ status as U.S. client states and military outposts in their respective regions. Furthermore, documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act in March 2021 reveal that the UK’s College of Policing also trained the Colombian police in 2018, 2019, and 2020.  

 As protesters continue to be hunted down and killed by Colombian police forces, a national strike and mass movement that started off opposing austerity measures has turned its focus onto U.S. interventionism. On May 28, a viral video showing Colombian protesters burning the U.S. and Israeli flags demonstrates this pivot towards an internationalist focus. As U.S. economic warfare currently harms an estimated one-third of the world’s population through sanctions and the weaponization of U.S. dominance over financial institutions controlled by the SWIFT network, U.S. allies like Israel and Colombia are empowered to engage in extensive human rights violations using U.S. military aid packages. 

Moving forward, several U.S. congressional representatives, including Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), have called for the application of the Leahy Law to freeze financial assistance to the Colombian military in response to human rights abuses. The U.S. must also enforce the Arms Export Control Act to prohibit private arms manufacturers from exporting weapons to Colombian security forces and Section 116 of the Foreign Assistance Act to halt all military aid to a government that terrorizes its own population. However, as the United States continues to militarize its own police forces and Israel uses U.S. weapons to massacre civilians in Gaza, we must view Colombia as part of the larger pattern of U.S. tax dollars bolstering authoritarianism at home and abroad.