The Culture of Fear
by Noam Chomsky
[ This essay is the introduction to COLOMBIA: THE GENOCIDAL DEMOCRACY,
a 125-page book by Javier Giraldo S.J., published in 1996. ]
TWO FACTS should be uppermost in the minds of North American readers
of Father Giraldo's documentation of the reign of terror that engulfed
Colombia during the "Dirty War" waged by the state security forces and
their paramilitary associates from the early 1980s. The first is that
Colombia's "democra-tatorship," as Eduardo Galeano termed this amalgam
of democratic forms and totalitarian terror, has managed to compile
the worst human rights record in the hemisphere in recent years, no
small achievement when one considers the competition. The second is
that Colombia has had accessories in crime, primary among them the
government of the United States, though Britain, Israel, Germany, and
others have also helped to train and arm the assassins and torturers
of the narco-military-landowner network that maintains "stability" in
a country that is rich in promise, and a nightmare for many of its
people.
In July 1989, the US State Department announced plans for subsidized
sales of military equipment to Colombia, allegedly "for antinarcotics
purposes." The sales were "justified" by the fact that "Colombia has a
democratic form of government and does not exhibit a consistent
pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human
rights."
A few months before, the Commission of Justice and Peace that Father
Giraldo heads had published a report documenting atrocities in the
first part of 1988, including over 3,000 politically-motivated
killings, 273 in "social cleansing" campaigns. Political killings
averaged eight a day, with seven people murdered in their homes or in
the street and one "disappeared."
Citing this report, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA)
added that "the vast majority of those who have disappeared in recent
years are grassroots organizers, peasant or union leaders, leftist
politicians, human rights workers, and other activists," over 1500 by
the time of the State Department's praise for Colombia's democracy and
its respect for human rights. During the 1988 electoral campaigns, 19
of 87 mayoral candidates of the sole independent political party, the
UP, were assassinated, along with over 100 of its other candidates.
The Central Organization of Workers, a coalition of trade unions
formed in 1986, had by then lost over 230 members, most of them found
dead after brutal torture.
But the "democratic form of government" emerged without stain, and
with no "consistent pattern of gross violations" of human rights.
By the time of the State Department's report, the practices it found
praiseworthy were being more efficiently implemented. Political
killings in 1988 and 1989 rose to 11 a day, the Colombian branch of
the Andean Commission of Jurists reported. From 1988 through early
1992, 9,500 people were assassinated for political reasons along with
830 disappearances and 313 massacres (between 1988 and 1990) of
peasants and poor people.
Throughout these years, as usual, the primary victims of state terror
were peasants. In 1988, grassroots organizations in one southern
department reported a "campaign of total annihilation and scorched
earth, Vietnam-style," conducted by the military forces "in a most
criminal manner, with assassinations of men, women, elderly, and
children. Homes and crops are burned, obligating the peasants to leave
their lands." Also in 1988 the government of Colombia established a
new judicial regime that called for "total war against the internal
enemy." It authorized "maximal criminalization of the political and
social opposition," a European-Latin American Inquiry reported in
Brussels, reviewing "the consolidation of state terror in Colombia."
As the State Department report appeared a year after these events, the
Colombian Minister of Defense again articulated the doctrine of "total
war" by state power "in the political, economic, and social arenas."
Guerrillas were the official targets, but as a high military official
had observed in 1987, their organizations were of minor importance:
"the real danger," he explained, is "what the insurgents have called
the political and psychological war," the efforts "to control the
popular elements" and "to manipulate the masses." The "subversives"
hope to influence unions, universities, media, and so on, and the
government must counter this "war" with its own "total war in the
political, economic, and social arenas."
Reviewing doctrine and practice, the Brussels study concludes
realistically that the "internal enemy" of the state terrorist
apparatus extends to "labor organizations, popular movements,
indigenous organizations, oppositional political parties, peasant
movements, intellectual sectors, religious currents, youth and student
groups, neighborhood organizations," indeed any group that must be
secured against undesirable influences. "Every individual who in one
or another manner supports the goals of the enemy must be considered a
traitor and treated in that manner," a Colombian military manual
prescribes.
The manual dates from 1963. At that time, violence in Colombia was
coming to be "exacerbated by external factors," the president of the
Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights, former Minister of
Foreign Affairs Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, wrote some years later,
reviewing the outcome. "During the Kennedy administration," he
continues, Washington "took great pains to transform our regular
armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of
the death squads."
These initiatives "ushered in what is known in Latin America as the
National Security Doctrine,...not defense against an external enemy,
but a way to make the military establishment the masters of the
game...[with] the right to combat the internal enemy, as set forth in
the Brazilian doctrine, and the Colombian doctrine: it is the right
to fight and to exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and
women who are not supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed
to be communist extremists."
The "Dirty War" escalated in the early 1980s--not only in Colombia--
as the Reagan administration extended these programs throughout the
region, leaving it devastated, strewn with hundreds of thousands of
corpses, tortured and mutilated people who might otherwise have been
insufficiently supportive of the establishment, perhaps even
influenced by "subversives."
North Americans should never allow themselves to forget the origins of
"the Brazilian doctrine, the Argentine doctrine, the Uruguayan
doctrine, the Colombian doctrine," and others like them. They were
crafted right here, then adapted by students trained and equipped
right here. The basic guidelines are spelled out in US manuals of
counterinsurgency and "low intensity conflict."
These are euphemisms, technical terms for state terror, a fact well
known in Latin America. When Archbishop Oscar Romero wrote to
President Carter in 1980 shortly before his assassination, vainly
pleading with him to end US support for the state terrorist, he
informed the rector of the Jesuit University, Father Ellacuria, that
he was prompted "by the new concept of special warfare, which consists
in murderously eliminating every endeavor of the popular organizations
under the allegation of Communism or terrorism . . ." So Father
Ellacuria reported shortly before he was assassinated by the same
hands a decade later; the events framed the murderous decade with the
symbolism as gruesome as it was appropriate.
The agents of state terror are the beneficiaries of US training
designed to ensure that they have an "understanding of, and
orientation toward, US objectives," Defense Secretary Robert McNamera
informed National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy in 1965. This is a
matter of particular importance "in the Latin American cultural
environment," where it is recognized that the military must be
prepared to "remove government leaders from office, whenever, in the
judgment of the military, the conduct of these leaders is injurious to
the welfare of the nation." It is the right of the military and those
who provide them with the proper orientation who are entitled to
determine the welfare of the nation, not the beasts of burden toiling
and suffering and expiring in their own lands.
When the State Department announced new arms shipments as a reward for
Colombia's achievements in human rights and democracy, it surely had
access to the record of atrocities that had been compiled by the
leading international and Colombian human rights organizations. It was
fully aware of the US role in establishing and maintaining the regime
of terror and oppression. The example is, unfortunately, typical of a
pattern that hardly varies, as can be readily verified.
As the "Dirty War" of the 1980s took its ever more grisly toll, US
participation increased. From 1984 through 1992, 6,844 Colombian
soldiers were trained under the US international Military Education
and Training Program. Over 2,000 Colombian officers were trained from
1990 to 1992, as "violence reached unprecedented levels" during the
presidency of Cesar Gaviria, WOLA reported, confirming conclusions of
international human rights monitors.
President Gaviria was a particular favorite of Washington, so admired
that the Clinton administration imposed him as Secretary-General of
the Organization of American States in a power play that aroused much
resentment. "He has been very forward looking in building democratic
institutions in a country where it was sometimes dangerous to do so,"
the US representative to the OAS explained--not inquiring into the
reasons for the "dangers," however. The training program for Colombian
officers is the largest in the hemisphere, and US military aid to
Colombia now amounts to about half the total for the entire
hemisphere. It has increased under Clinton, Human Rights Watch
reports, adding that he planned to turn to emergency overdrawing
facilities when the Pentagon did not suffice for still further
increases.
The official cover story for the participation in crime is the war
"against the guerrillas and narcotrafficking operations." In its 1989
announcement of new arms sales, the State Department could rely on its
human right reports, which attributed virtually all violence to the
guerrillas and narcotraffickers. Hence the US is "justified" in
providing military equipment and training for the mass murderers and
torturers.
A month later, George Bush announced the largest shipment of arms ever
authorized under the emergency provisions of the Foreign Assistance
Act. The arms were not sent to the National Police, which is
responsible for almost all counternarcotic operations, but to the
army. The helicopters and jet planes are useless for the drug war, as
was pointed out at once, but not for other purposes. Human rights
groups soon reported the bombing of villages and other atrocities. It
is also impossible to imagine that Washington is not aware that the
security forces it is maintaining are closely linked to the
narcotrafficking operations, and that exactly as their leaders frankly
say, the target is the "internal enemy" that might support or be
influenced by "subversives" in some way.
A January 1994 conference on state terror organized by Jesuits in San
Salvador observed that "it is important to explore...what weight the
culture of terror has had in domesticating the expectations of the
majority vis-a-vis alternatives different to those of the powerful."
That is the crucial point, wherever such methods are used to subdue
the "internal enemy."
Israeli physician Ruchama Marton, who has been at the forefront of
investigation of the use of torture by the security forces of her own
country, points out that while confessions obtained by torture are of
course meaningless, the real purpose is not confession. Rather, it is
silence, "silence induced by fear." "Fear is contagious," she
continues, "and spreads to the other members of the oppressed group,
to silence and paralyze them. To impose silence through violence is
torture's real purpose, in the most profound and fundamental sense."
The same is true of all other aspects of the doctrines that have been
devised and implemented with our guidance and support under a series
of fraudulent guides.
To impose silence on the internal enemy is necessary in the
"democra-tatorships" that US policy has sought to impose on its
domains ever since it "assumed, out of self-interest, responsibility
for the welfare of the world capitalist system," in the words of
diplomatic Gerald Haines, senior historian of the CIA, discussing the
US takeover of Brazil in 1945---and indeed before, with important
echoes at home as well. It is particularly important to impose silence
in the region with the highest inequality in the world, thanks in no
small measure to policies of the superpower that largely controls it.
It is necessary to impose silence and spread fear in countries like
Colombia, where the top three percent of the landed elite own over 70%
of arable land while 57% of the poorest farmers subsist on under 3%--
a country where 40% of the population live in "absolute poverty,"
unable to satisfy basic subsistence needs according to an official
government report in 1986, and 18% live in "absolute misery," unable
to meet nutritional needs. The Colombian Institute of Family Welfare
estimates that four and a half million children under 14 are hungry,
half the country's children.
Recall that we are speaking of a country of enormous resources and
potential. It has "one of the healthiest and most flourishing
economies in Latin America," Latin Americanist John Martz writes in
Current History, lauding this triumph of capitalism in a society with
"democratic structures" which, "notwithstanding inevitable flaws, are
among the most solid on the continent," a model of "well-established
political stability"--conclusions that are not inaccurate, if not
quite in the sense he seeks to convey.
The effects of US arms and military training are not confined to
Colombia. The record of horrors is all too full. In the Jesuit journal
America, Rev. Daniel Santiago, a priest working in El Salvador,
reported in 1990 the story of a peasant woman who returned home one
day to find her mother, sister, and three children sitting around a
table, the decapitated head of each person placed on the table in
front of the body, the hands arranged on top "as if each body was
stroking its own head." The assassins, from the Salvadoran National
Guard, had found it hard to keep the head of an 18-month-old baby in
place, so they nailed the hands to it. A large plastic bowl filled
with blood stood in the center of the table.
Two years earlier, the Salvadoran human rights group that continued to
function despite the assassination of its founders and directors
reported that 13 bodies had been found in the preceding two weeks,
most showing signs of torture, including two women who had been hanged
from a tree by their hair, their breasts cut off and their faces
painted red. The discoveries were familiar, but the timing is
significant, just as Washington was successfully completing the
cynical exercise of exempting its murderous clients from the terms of
the Central America peace accords that called for "justice, freedom,
and democracy," "respect for human rights," and guarantees for "the
endless inviolability of all forms of life and liberty." The record is
endless, and endlessly shocking.
Such macabre scenes, which rarely reached the mainstream in the United
States, are designed for intimidation. Father Santiago writes that
"People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador--they are
decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot
the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by Salvadoran Treasury
Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed in their mouths.
Salvadoran women are not just raped by the national guard; their wombs
are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not
enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the
flesh falls from their bones while parents are forced to watch." "The
aesthetics of terror in El Salvador is religious." The intention is to
ensure that the individual is totally subordinated to the interests of
the Fatherland, which is why death squads are sometimes called the
"Army of National Salvation" by the governing ARENA party.
The same is true in neighboring Guatemala. In the traditional "culture
of fear," Latin American scholar Piero Gleijeses writes, peace and
order were guaranteed by ferocious repression, and its contemporary
counterpart follows the same course: "Just as the Indian was branded a
savage beast to justify his exploitation, so those who have sought
social guerrillas, or terrorists, or drug dealers, or whatever the
current term of art may be." The fundamental reason, however, is
always the same: the savage beast may fall under the influence of
"subversives" who challenge the regime of injustice, oppression, and
terror that must continue to serve the interests of foreign investors
and domestic privilege.
Throughout these grim years, nothing has been more inspiring than the
courage and dedication of those who have sought to expose and overcome
the culture of fear in their suffering countries. They have left
martyrs, whose voices have been silenced by the powerful--yet another
crime.
But they continue to struggle on. Father Giraldo's remarkable work and
eloquent words should not only inspire us, but also impel us to act to
bring these terrors to an end, as we can. His testimony here contains
an "urgent appeal." It should be answered, but it does not go far
enough. Our responsibilities extend well beyond. The fate of
Colombians and many others hinges on our willingness and ability to
recognize and meet them.
--Noam Chomsky, Cambridge MA, May 1995
The English version of COLOMBIA: THE GENOCIDAL DEMOCRACY is available
from Common Courage Press. PO Box 702, Monroe ME 04951. Write for
their free catalogue. Common Courage offers some of the best--and
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