Two Oppressive States Join Forces

Demonstrators pose for a photo during a new protest against the government of Colombian President Ivan Duque, in Medellin, Colombia, on May 26, 2021. [AFP/ Joaquin Sarmiento]

By Belén Fernández

Colombia’s Foreign Ministry responded to the recent Israeli military campaign in Gaza by expressing “concern over terrorist acts” and “solidarity with the victims of these actions.” But the terrorist acts it condemned did not include Israel’s 11 days of airstrikes against a captive, mostly refugee population crowded into a densely populated strip, while its solidarity was reserved only for the 12 Israelis killed, not for the 248 Palestinians.

That was no surprise though, because Israel and Colombia are two peas in a bellicose pod, engaging in the United States-backed state terrorism known as the War on Terror. Israel and its allies reserve the “terrorist” label for Palestinians, who, as we know, have been subjected to 70-plus years of land theft, ethnic cleansing and massacres. In Colombia, the “terrorists” have traditionally been members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) – the left-wing guerrilla movement formed in the 1960s in response to obscene economic inequality and authoritarian tyranny – although the term is quite flexibly applied to pretty much anyone opposed to a right-wing government.

Like in Israel, land theft and the forced displacement of Indigenous communities is also a theme of the Colombian political landscape. The survival of campesino, or small farmer, communities has tended to complicate corporate plunder and other profitable endeavors in resource-rich areas. Many years ago, I visited the persecuted peace community of San José de Apartadó in northern Colombia. The community co-founder María Brígida González – whose 15-year-old daughter Eliseña was killed in her sleep in 2005 by Colombian soldiers who portrayed her as a FARC militant – surmised that the purpose of such operations was to “sow terror” in order to clear the land and facilitate resource exploitation.

The connection is deeper than just a parallel though: Israel has long exported expertise and equipment to Colombia. Carlos Castaño, one of the principal architects of modern right-wing Colombian paramilitary formations, acknowledged having copied the whole paramilitary concept from the Israelis following a 1983 training session in the Promised Land.

Israeli mercenaries were also in demand in 1980s Colombia and, as The Washington Post reported, worked to “train and arm assassins” on behalf of Medellín cartel leader Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, an “extreme rightist who harbored the dream of building a neo-fascist state.”

As of 2018, Israel was the No. 2 supplier of arms to the Colombian military, outdone only by the United States. That would be the same military which, it was revealed in 2018, had slaughtered more than 10,000 civilians during the presidency of Álvaro Uribe (2002-10), who had close ties to the U.S. The government passed off the corpses as those of FARC guerrillas, thereby justifying continued U.S. aid. The Israeli military, alongside its regular murder of Palestinians, also receives enormous amounts of U.S. aid, cementing Israel and Colombia as major sources of prosperity for the U.S. arms industry.

Indeed, the Israeli-Colombian relationship has become so special that previous Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos once appeared in a promotional video for an Israeli private security firm operating in Colombia. On another occasion, he affirmed: “We’ve even been accused of being the Israelites of Latin America, which personally makes me feel really proud.”

Current Colombian president Iván Duque seems to be equally enthusiastic. A September 2020 post on the website of the General Command of the Colombian Military Forces made it known that Israeli army instructors were training Colombian special forces in “counterterrorism and combat techniques,” to promote the “technification and professionalization of the National Army.” As if there were any doubt that Israel’s extermination of entire families in the Gaza Strip were anything less than technified.

In addition to the assault on Gaza, Israeli security forces have been busy as of late repressing Palestinian protests against the ethnic cleansing of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem – which has entailed charging protesters on horseback, spraying them with skunk water and tear gas, and firing rubber-coated metal bullets and stun grenades. As it happens, Colombian security forces have also been repressing protesters, who initially took to the streets in April to oppose punitive tax-reform proposals. The protests have since evolved to focus on institutionalized poverty, inequality and state violence – in other words, the very issues that gave rise to the FARC in the first place. At least 43 people have been killed thus far.

A May 20 statement from Amnesty International titled, “The United States must stop providing weapons used to repress Colombia’s protests,” quotes Amnesty’s advocacy director Philippe Nassif: “The United States government has been an agonizing party to the killing, disappearances, sexual violence and other torture, and horrendous repression of dozens of mostly peaceful demonstrations.” The U.S., of course, also acts as an “agonizing party” in Israel’s war on Palestinians, while Israel does the same in Colombia’s war on its poor and working class people – resulting in a grotesque ménage à trois.

But the threesome is not only about weapons. In 2008, the late president of Venezuela Hugo Chávez denounced Colombia as the “Israel of Latin America” following a lethal and illegal Colombian raid into Ecuador in pursuit of “terrorists.” According to The New York Times write-up of the affair, then-U.S. president George W. Bush “used the diplomatic crisis to push Congress to approve a Colombia [free] trade deal that has languished for more than a year because of concerns … over human rights abuses” – effectively marketing the agreement as an “issue of national security.”

Israel’s very own free trade agreement with Colombia was ratified last year amidst much mutual flattery. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Duque’s “leadership in the fight against terrorism sets an example for the rest of Latin America.” Duque pledged to open an “innovation office” in Jerusalem, which Israel innovatively claims as its capital in contravention of international law.

Now, as both Israel and Colombia profit from the perpetuation of insecurity while portraying themselves as the victims of the people they’re killing, it’s worth recalling the words of Alberto Lleras Camargo, president of Colombia from 1958-62. Reflecting on the U.S.-backed counterinsurgency campaign that came on the heels of the assassination of popular leftist presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 – the year of Israel’s foundation, no less – Lleras Camargo remarked that “blood and capital accumulation went together.”

Regrettably for humanity, they still do.

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