Letters to the Editor

Fred Hiatt's foreign policy "principles" The Washington Post editorial page editor, in defending the Colombian government, illustrates the core premises of American foreign policy discourse. Glenn Greenwald [2008-03-05]

• A further parallel: U.S. press at best lightly covered scandal of Colombian government linked to right wing death squads

  Interventionist ideologues like Fred Hiatt who proclaim to be outraged since the FARC terrorists (and they are, they are no peoples' revolutionaries) have killed civilians showed their true colors by dismissing one of the biggest scandals to have ever occurred in Colombia -- the "parapolitics" (or "parapolitica") scandal in which now some 50 plus government figures have been directly linked to right wing paramilitaries (non-governmental heavily armed combatants so called because they originated with U.S. military advisers of the Colombian military).

  This is no light matter. The vast majority of civilians killed in the Colombian civil war were killed by the paramilitary death squads, including massacres of entire villages.

  Like current reports that Chavez is funding the FARC, the latest round of revelations & investigations of the paramilitary / government links were occasioned by the capture of computers belonging to paramilitary leader Jorge 40.

  Here is how Hiatt's newspaper and one of its reporters covered it:

  Paramilitary Scandal Takes Colombian Elite by Surprise

  By Juan Forero

  Washington Post Foreign Service

  Thursday, February 22, 2007; Page A10

  BOGOTA, Colombia -- Col. Hernán Mejía was among Colombia's most decorated officers, a young, strapping warrior with five medals for valor on his chest and a reputation for being a relentless adversary of the Marxist guerrillas who operated in the dusty hamlets of northeast Colombia.

  But after disclosures that have astonished many Colombians, Mejía has been removed from his post, and the attorney general's office is investigating him for having worked with right-wing paramilitary groups to kill peasant farmers and guerrilla sympathizers. The allegations, announced by Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos in January, mark the first time the military has turned over one of its own to civilian prosecutors on suspicion of collaborating with the death squads...

  ...Human rights groups have long contended that the military has used paramilitary groups as a proxy force in its war on rebels, but the depth of those connections -- and the degree to which senior political and military officials are being prosecuted -- has shaken the country. The disclosures also have provided a glimmer of hope for a genuine catharsis in a country that has been enmeshed in conflict for decades...

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/21/AR2007022101820.html

  And here's Hiatt's awesome, pro-democracy, human rights stance on this matter:

  Assault on an Ally

  Why are Democrats so 'deeply troubled' by Colombia's Álvaro Uribe?

  Sunday, May 6, 2007; Page B06

  COLOMBIAN President Álvaro Uribe may be the most popular democratic leader in the world. Last week, as he visited Washington, a poll showed his approval rating at 80.4 percent -- extraordinary for a politician who has been in office nearly five years. Colombians can easily explain this: Since his first election in 2002, Mr. Uribe has rescued their country from near-failed-state status, doubling the size of the army and extending the government's control to large areas that for decades were ruled by guerrillas and drug traffickers. The murder rate has dropped by nearly half and kidnappings by 75 percent. For the first time thugs guilty of massacres and other human rights crimes are being brought to justice, and the political system is being purged of their allies. With more secure conditions for investment, the free-market economy is booming.

  In a region where populist demagogues are on the offensive, Mr. Uribe stands out as a defender of liberal democracy, not to mention a staunch ally of the United States. So it was remarkable to see the treatment that the Colombian president received in Washington. After a meeting with the Democratic congressional leadership, Mr. Uribe was publicly scolded by House Majority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), whose statement made no mention of the "friendship" she recently offered Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Human Rights Watch, which has joined the Democratic campaign against Mr. Uribe, claimed that "today Colombia presents the worst human rights and humanitarian crisis in the Western hemisphere" -- never mind Venezuela or Cuba or Haiti...

  What could explain this backlash? Democrats claim to be concerned -- far more so than Colombians, apparently -- with "revelations" that the influence of right-wing paramilitary groups extended deep into the military and Congress. In fact this has been well-known for years; what's new is that investigations by Colombia's Supreme Court and attorney general have resulted in the jailing and prosecution of politicians and security officials. Many of those implicated come from Mr. Uribe's Conservative Party, and his former intelligence chief is under investigation. But the president himself has not been charged with wrongdoing. On the contrary: His initiative to demobilize 30,000 right-wing paramilitary fighters last year paved the way for the current investigations, which he and his government have supported and funded...

  What Hiatt dismisses as being "well known for years" would come as a shock to those used to reading that there were but two sides to the Colombian civil war -- the government and the rebels, with drug traffickers as a horizontally related component. One would be hard pressed to find the Americans who had read "for years" in their U.S. papers that the Colombian government had been consistently coordinating their activities with the most murderous force in the civil war and the largest forces controlling the national drug trade.

  Also easily dismissed by Hiatt is that the scandal implicated the man who was his intelligence chief and re-election campaign director.

  Maybe what Hiatt means by "well known for years" refers to the years in which human rights campaigners had been assassinated while begging the foreign media pay attention to the role of the paramilitaries.

  For those people closely following the issue, I cannot easily say how disgusted I was with Hiatt -- and how familiar it all sounded to those who followed U.S. interventions in Central America throughout the 1980s -- whose outrage focused entirely on those pressing investigations forward, whom he confuses wrongly with the Colombian president.

  -- El Cid
  [Read El Cid's other letters]
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