Plan Colombia: U.S. Ally Atrocities and Community Activism by John Lindsay-Poland (review)

Some of the most important and insightful books about the decades-long violence in Colombia have been written by human rights activists—Steven Dudley's Walking Ghosts, Robin Kirk's More Terrible than Death, and Winifred Tate's Counting the Dead among them. Many of these activists-turned-authors served with accompaniment-oriented organizations, like Peace Brigades International, which placed (mostly) First World volunteers alongside Colombians facing death threats. The purpose of this exercise was not direct deterrence—activists were not bodyguards and did not physically protect their charges, and hence they did not die with them. But they did invariably befriend future victims of violence, and occasionally witnessed murder firsthand. They also became well-informed sources on localized conditions and specific acts of violence, giving us a window, albeit a very narrow one, into on-the-ground conditions in Colombia's protracted conflict. In contrast, few academics ventured into the war zones.

John Lindsay-Poland is a vintage activist-author, having opposed US policies in Central America in the 1980s, and US militarism in general, in a non-violent peace tradition, mainly through the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Fortunately, his Plan Colombia book avoids a micro-focus, devoting only about one-fifth of its material to a February 2005 mini-massacre, and its subsequent cover-up, in the Urabá region of northwestern Colombia. Unfortunately, that focus is on the highly unique and heavily chronicled "peace community" of San José de Apartadó, the most accompanied and robustly monitored, activist-backed site in all of Colombia. This is not to minimize the loss of life (eighteen dead), but it is striking indeed that we have such fine-tuned documentation here while the deaths of untold thousands in the Llanos, Chocó, Putumayo, and elsewhere, will forever remain unknown.

Lindsay-Poland partially acknowledges this spectacular knowledge gap when he addresses the "False Positives." Thanks to Colombian human rights organizations, and confessions from a few Colombian army officers, we know that several thousand poor civilians were lured to their deaths in a quest to fulfill "dead guerrilla" body counts in the early 2000s, as mandated by the US military (the ghost of Robert McNamara lives on!). His contention that paramilitary and army violence was widespread and systemic is beyond dispute. We will never know how many Colombians died in the carnage from 1997 to 2010, which was the peak killing period since the FARC's emergence in the early 1960s. There is also little reason to doubt Lindsey-Poland's premise that state-funded terror swept away far more lives than the sloppy and vindictive guerrillas. Yet silly is his assertion that "grassroots movements inside and outside the United States can have a substantial impact on limiting or stopping US military intervention" (24). Does he believe that activism somehow limited US intervention in Colombia? Activism could not even prevent army-paramilitary attacks on the heavily monitored hamlet of San José de Apartadó. What activist-authors like Lindsay-Poland consistently neglect to acknowledge is this: US policy in Colombia has materially benefitted the average (North) American. Much of this book is an indictment of that policy, and at times the author even points to economic factors and motives behind it (most overtly on p. 16). He singles out Al Gore, with his family's longstanding connections to Occidental Petroleum (which operates heavily in Colombia), but Gore is not alone in prospering from US policy. Washington's funding of the Colombian war machine was logical, given the Colombian government's longstanding and generous accommodation of US corporations (most importantly in the mining sector, where these businesses register as Canadian entities for tax and regulation purposes). In Urabá, agricultural products for export predominate, most notably bananas and palm oil. The FARC and other guerrilla groups, in contrast, openly critiqued capitalism and called for a more equitable distribution of wealth, both in Colombia and beyond. In a world where (North) Americans consume roughly seven times their proportion...