America's Other War

America's Other War PDF Author: Doug Stokes
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848136129
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
This controversial book maintains that in Colombia the US has long supported a pervasive campaign of state violence directed against both armed insurgents and a wide range of unarmed progressive social forces. While the context may change from one decade to the next, the basic policies remain the same: maintain the pro-US Colombian state, protect US economic interests and preserve strategic access to oil. Colombia is now the third largest recipient of US military aid in the world, and the largest by far in Latin America. Using extensive declassified documents, this book shows that the so-called "war on drugs", and now the new war on terror in Colombia are actually part of a long-term Colombian "war of state terror" that predates the end of the Cold War with US policy contributing directly to the human rights situation in Colombia today.

America's Other War

America's Other War PDF Author: Doug Stokes
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848136129
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Get Book Here

Book Description
This controversial book maintains that in Colombia the US has long supported a pervasive campaign of state violence directed against both armed insurgents and a wide range of unarmed progressive social forces. While the context may change from one decade to the next, the basic policies remain the same: maintain the pro-US Colombian state, protect US economic interests and preserve strategic access to oil. Colombia is now the third largest recipient of US military aid in the world, and the largest by far in Latin America. Using extensive declassified documents, this book shows that the so-called "war on drugs", and now the new war on terror in Colombia are actually part of a long-term Colombian "war of state terror" that predates the end of the Cold War with US policy contributing directly to the human rights situation in Colombia today.

Plan Colombia

Plan Colombia PDF Author: John Lindsay-Poland
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478002611
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
For more than fifty years, the United States supported the Colombian military in a war that cost over 200,000 lives. During a single period of heightened U.S. assistance known as Plan Colombia, the Colombian military killed more than 5,000 civilians. In Plan Colombia John Lindsay-Poland narrates a 2005 massacre in the San José de Apartadó Peace Community and the subsequent investigation, official cover-up, and response from the international community. He examines how the multibillion-dollar U.S. military aid and official indifference contributed to the Colombian military's atrocities. Drawing on his human rights activism and interviews with military officers, community members, and human rights defenders, Lindsay-Poland describes grassroots initiatives in Colombia and the United States that resisted militarized policy and created alternatives to war. Although they had few resources, these initiatives offered models for constructing just and peaceful relationships between the United States and other nations. Yet, despite the civilian death toll and documented atrocities, Washington, DC, considered Plan Colombia's counterinsurgency campaign to be so successful that it became the dominant blueprint for U.S. military intervention around the world.

Colombia's Killer Networks

Colombia's Killer Networks PDF Author: Human Rights Watch/Americas
Publisher: Human Rights Watch
ISBN: 9781564322036
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
VI. The U.S role

Colombian Agency and the making of US Foreign Policy

Colombian Agency and the making of US Foreign Policy PDF Author: Alvaro Mendez
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317215737
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
This book studies a significant event in US relations with Latin America, shedding light on the role of dependent states and their foreign policy agency in the process by which local concerns become intertwined with the dominant state’s foreign policy. Plan Colombia was a large-scale foreign aid programme through which the US intervened in the internal affairs of Colombia, by invitation. It proved to be one of the major successes of US foreign policy, and has been credited with stemming a potentially catastrophic security failure of the Colombian state. This book discusses the strategies and practices deployed by the Colombian government to influence US foreign policy decision making at the bureaucratic, legislative and executive levels, and is a distinctive contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of small power agency. Giving a clearer insight into the decision making processes in both the US and Colombia, this book founds its argument on solid empirical analysis assembled from interviews of the major players in the events including: Andres Pastrana, President of Colombia; Thomas Pickering, US State Department; Arturo Valenzuela, Senior Director for Inter-American Affairs at the NSA; General Barry McCaffrey, the US ‘Drug Czar’; and Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the US House of Representatives. Approaching the events in question from a bottom-up theoretical perspective that puts the emphasis on the facts of the case, this book will be of great interest to academics, students and policy makers in the field of foreign policy analysis, US foreign policy studies, and Latin American studies.

Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror

Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror PDF Author: Oliver Villar
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583673075
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Since the late 1990s, the United States has funneled billions of dollars in aid to Colombia, ostensibly to combat the illicit drug trade and State Department-designated terrorist groups. The result has been a spiral of violence that continues to take lives and destabilize Colombian society. This book asks an obvious question: are the official reasons given for the wars on drugs and terror in Colombia plausible, or are there other, deeper factors at work? Scholars Villar and Cottle suggest that the answers lie in a close examination of the cocaine trade, particularly its class dimensions. Their analysis reveals that this trade has fueled extensive economic growth and led to the development of a "narco-state" under the control of a "narco-bourgeoisie" which is not interested in eradicating cocaine but in gaining a monopoly over its production. The principal target of this effort is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who challenge that monopoly as well as the very existence of the Colombian state. Meanwhile, U.S. business interests likewise gain from the cocaine trade and seek to maintain a dominant, imperialist relationship with their most important client state in Latin America. Suffering the brutal consequences, as always, are the peasants and workers of Colombia. This revelatory book punctures the official propaganda and shows the class war underpinning the politics of the Colombian cocaine trade.

The Losing War

The Losing War PDF Author: Jonathan D. Rosen
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438452993
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Critical analysis of Plan Colombia, a multibillion dollar US counternarcotics initiative.

Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats

Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats PDF Author: Winifred Tate
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804792011
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In 2000, the U.S. passed a major aid package that was going to help Colombia do it all: cut drug trafficking, defeat leftist guerrillas, support peace, and build democracy. More than 80% of the assistance, however, was military aid, at a time when the Colombian security forces were linked to abusive, drug-trafficking paramilitary forces. Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats examines the U.S. policymaking process in the design, implementation, and consequences of Plan Colombia, as the aid package came to be known. Winifred Tate explores the rhetoric and practice of foreign policy by the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon, Congress, and the U.S. military Southern Command. Tate's ethnography uncovers how policymakers' utopian visions and emotional entanglements play a profound role in their efforts to orchestrate and impose social transformation abroad. She argues that U.S. officials' zero tolerance for illegal drugs provided the ideological architecture for the subsequent militarization of domestic drug policy abroad. The U.S. also ignored Colombian state complicity with paramilitary brutality, presenting them as evidence of an absent state and the authentic expression of a frustrated middle class. For rural residents of Colombia living under paramilitary dominion, these denials circulated as a form of state terror. Tate's analysis examines how oppositional activists and the policy's targets—civilians and local state officials in southern Colombia—attempted to shape aid design and delivery, revealing the process and effects of human rights policymaking.

Islands of Resistance

Islands of Resistance PDF Author: Mario Murillo
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609801180
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
While 1998 marked the 100th anniversary of the United States' invasion and takeover of Puerto Rico, it wasn't until 1999 that the island's political movements reappeared on the radar screen of the American people. That year, two major developments occurred that transformed the relationship between Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.: the limited clemency granted by then-President Clinton to eleven Puerto Rican Nationalists, and the death of Puerto Rican civilian security guard David Sanes, killed by missile fragments from U.S. naval bombing tests on the island municipality of Vieques. How does Vieques fit into the political future of Puerto Rico? While anti-Navy protesters are careful not to mix the island's political status options with their battle against the Navy, it is important to understand the role Washington has played in shaping Puerto Rico's current reality and how it has allowed the Navy to use Vieques as a bombing range for 60 years. It also helps one begin to predict what is the future of Puerto Rico. Is it to be a colony? Fifty-first state of the United States? Sovereign nation? In Islands of Resistance, Mario A. Murillo approaches these questions by examining how Puerto Rican politics have been shaped as much by 100 years of U.S. economic, military, and cultural domination of the territory, as by the enduring grassroots resistance of the Puerto Rican people. Islands of Resistance puts the contemporary situation in Puerto Rico into an historic context that will help people understand what is at stake in Vieques, not only for Viequenses, but for Puerto Ricans, both on the island and in the diaspora.

American Hegemony and the Rise of Emerging Powers

American Hegemony and the Rise of Emerging Powers PDF Author: Salvador Santino Regilme
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315529351
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Over the last decade, the United States' position as the world's most powerful state has appeared increasingly unstable. The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, non-traditional security threats, global economic instability, the apparent spread of authoritarianism and illiberal politics, together with the rise of emerging powers from the Global South have led many to predict the end of Western dominance on the global stage. This book brings together scholars from international relations, economics, history, sociology and area studies to debate the future of US leadership in the international system. The book analyses the past, present and future of US hegemony in key regions in the Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Middle East, Europe and Africa – while also examining the dynamic interactions of US hegemony with other established, rising and re-emerging powers such as Russia, China, Japan, India, Turkey and South Africa. American Hegemony and the Rise of Emerging Powers explores how changes in the patterns of cooperation and conflict among states, regional actors and transnational non-state actors have affected the rise of emerging global powers and the suggested decline of US leadership. Scholars, students and policy practitioners who are interested in the future of the US-led international system, the rise of emerging powers from the Global South and related global policy challenges will find this multidisciplinary volume an invaluable guide to the shifting position of American hegemony.

Guerrilla Marketing

Guerrilla Marketing PDF Author: Alexander L. Fattal
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022659064X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Brand warfare is real. Guerrilla Marketing details the Colombian government’s efforts to transform Marxist guerrilla fighters in the FARC into consumer citizens. Alexander L. Fattal shows how the market has become one of the principal grounds on which counterinsurgency warfare is waged and postconflict futures are imagined in Colombia. This layered case study illuminates a larger phenomenon: the convergence of marketing and militarism in the twenty-first century. Taking a global view of information warfare, Guerrilla Marketing combines archival research and extensive fieldwork not just with the Colombian Ministry of Defense and former rebel communities, but also with political exiles in Sweden and peace negotiators in Havana. Throughout, Fattal deftly intertwines insights into the modern surveillance state, peace and conflict studies, and humanitarian interventions, on one hand, with critical engagements with marketing, consumer culture, and late capitalism on the other. The result is a powerful analysis of the intersection of conflict and consumerism in a world where governance is increasingly structured by brand ideology and wars sold as humanitarian interventions. Full of rich, unforgettable ethnographic stories, Guerrilla Marketing is a stunning and troubling analysis of the mediation of global conflict.