COLOMBIA: US-Uribe anti-FARC offensive fails

March 23, 2005

COLOMBIA: US-Uribe anti-FARC offensive fails


James J. Brittain

The US and the Colombian state have, since the 1960s, implemented a coercive socio-economic and military campaign to destroy the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). However, this half-century effort has resulted in an immense and embarrassing failure for Washington and the Colombian capitalist ruling class.

To respond to the failure, and the subsequent increase of the FARC-EP and its mass base, the rulers of the two nations have reformulated their politico-economic and military operation directed against the FARC. Part of the reason for this is that international observers have recognised that levels of coca cultivation, processing and export have not only stabilised but have increasingly been taken over by the right-wing AUC paramilitary organisation.

In light of this fact, the US-Colombia coalition has slowly moved away from the facade of a “war on drugs” and directly into a focused armed campaign against the FARC insurgency and its mass base using the post-9/11 rationale of the “war on terrorism”.

US military personnel are now providing intelligence and logistical support alongside 17,000 Colombian troops carrying out Plan Patriota, an anti-guerrilla offensive in southern Colombia.

Last June, Inter-Press Service reported that a May 2004 memorandum to the US Congress from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) think-tank described Plan Patriota as “the most ambitious counter-insurgency offensive ever undertaken by the Colombian government”. The memorandum noted that unlike Plan Colombia — also financed by Washington — Plan Patriota “makes no pretense of furthering US counter-drug objectives”.
(snip/...)

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/620/620p20.htm

From Green Left Weekly, March 23, 2005.

They've long since lost that privilege. It would be nice if they'd let Ingrid Betancourt go.

It never really was much of a drug war, was it?


At least it looks like they gave up the facade of the "War On Drugs". Maybe if they stop using the "Marxist" and "Terrorist" excuses as well, people will start to wonder what the hell is actually going on down there. I'm sure that'll happen any day now. ;)

- Make7

"Therefore, the FARC has chosen to limit its immediate visible presence in rural towns and villages in the hope of diminishing the chance of injury against the rural populations that support the FARC."

It never ceases to amaze me the way these guys CANNOT understand
how guerilla warfare works. But I suppose it's like trying to explain
to Monsanto why organic farming is good.

Is this saying it began as part of the Alianza para progreso, or some other initiative that I'm unaware of?

have been fighting since then. I doubt that FARC took up arms
as part of or in response to Alliance for Progress. It might
be that AFP was a response to FARC and other such indigenous
reform movements or one sort and another, of which there are very
many in Latin American, and quite far back into history.