Rewriting the History of Plan Colombia [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

Rewriting the History of Plan Colombia
Posted 21 July 2015 13:54 GMT

It's probably a good thing that United States Army General John F. Kelly's May op-ed in the Miami Herald went largely unperceived, but recent developments have rendered the cynicism that informed it too blaring to ignore.

Ostensibly, General Kelly’s editorial seeks to extrapolate salient lessons from the Colombian government's military campaign against the country’s leftist guerrilla insurgency. Specifically, Kelly contends that Plan Colombia, the $9 billion U.S. military aid package passed in 2000, has “shown us the way” to defeat ISIS, which he claims poses a similarly “daunting challenge for the United States and its allies.”

On first read, the article is a relatively straightforward parade of banality and adulation, remarkable only because the individual leading it is the commander of U.S. Southern Command (Southcom). Sure, the content consists almost entirely of lies, half-truths, and meaningless platitudes, but nothing that ventures too far from the official Washington line.

Alex Lee, the deputy assistant secretary of state for South America and Cuba, and Bernie Aronson, the U.S. special envoy to Colombia's ongoing peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), gave similarly glowing appraisals to the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee just last month. And the Obama administration in general has not been adverse to overlooking human rights issues and overstating economic progress in Colombia–especially when it comes to the increasingly awful U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, which Mr. Obama strongly opposed in his 2008 campaign but has supported as president.

More:
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/07/21/rewriting-the-history-of-plan-colombia/