How US Intervention in Colombia Paved the Way for Mexico's Human Rights Crisis Julia Duranti and Maggie Ervin - Upside Down World
go to original December 18, 2014

Ayotzinapa has marked a turning point in Mexico, and movie star Luis Gerardo Méndez is fronting a new campaign to propose solutions to the violence, injustice and impunity gripping the country. Thousands have already sent postcards in the “YaMeCanse, por eso propongo” or “I've had enough, therefore I propose” campaign. (AJ+)

Until two weeks ago, there were 43 disappeared students in Guerrero, Mexico. Now there are 42. Despite tens of thousands of Mexican protesters chanting, “You took them alive! We want them back alive,” one of the students was officially pronounced dead on Saturday, December 6. Alexander Mora Venancio was just 19 years old. The identification of his remains was a transnational effort: Mexican officials found them, Austrian scientists tested them, and Argentine forensics verified them. But there are other countries with key roles in this story that have remained largely silent: the U.S. and its closest South American ally, Colombia. While the Mexican government scrambled to present the Ayotzinapa student massacre as a case of low-level corruption that can be solved by shuffling police units and criminalizing the protests that brought international scrutiny, a new report emerged claiming that federal police also participated in the torture and disappearance of the students. U.S. intervention in Colombia shows why the state violence evident in Ayotzinapa is anything but an isolated incident.

Colombia is rarely in the U.S. news these days, despite an ongoing armed conflict well over half a century old. Unlike the Middle East, Colombia’s guerrilla insurgents, while on the State Department Terrorist List, do not haunt U.S. imaginations as an imminent threat; unlike Central America, Colombia’s internally displaced persons - over 6 million at last count - rarely make it to U.S. borders.  This lack of coverage masks over 50 years of U.S. involvement. In line with the Cold War doctrine of containing communism at any cost, U.S. military officials under the Kennedy administration created paramilitary “self-defense” groups, called Plan Laso, to work in tandem with the Colombian state to crush leftist resistance in 1962 - two years before the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerilla insurgencies were formally constituted. Soon after,Colombian drug cartels emerged to meet U.S. demand for cocaine in the 1970’s and 1980’s. That ended with the assassination of Medellin cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar in 1993, carried out with U.S. support.

The Cali Cartel was defeated just a few years later, opening a vacuum in international cocaine distribution that loose criminal syndicates in Colombia and, notably, ascending cartels in Mexico were happy to fill. The fragmentation of the illicit drug trade in Colombia roughly correlated with market liberalization of the legal economy under President Cesar Gaviria with the slogan, “Welcome to the Future,” along with the Mexican financial crisis and passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. Throughout the 1990’s, the Colombian guerillas gained territory and soldiers, with the FARC’s ranks swelling to nearly 20,000 by 2001. This led to several key developments. The first was the 1997 consolidation of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a 30,000-strong paramilitary structure that collaborated with the Colombian military to commit some of the worst human rights violations in the country’s history before undergoing an incomplete demobilization process that left thousands of paramilitary descendants still active across the country. The second was a U.S. counternarcotics and counterinsurgency aid package known as Plan Colombia.

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