‘Iron Fists in Iron Gloves’: The Political Economy of US Terrorocracy Promotion in Colombia 1
Most analysts of US post-cold war policy in Colombia argue that the US has switched from targeting Communist guerrillas to a war on drugs and a new war on terror. Contrary to these claims this article shows that the US continues to back Colombian counter-insurgency efforts which essentially amount to a strategy of state terrorism under a democratic façade (terrorocracy). Moreover, this policy continues to be pursued because the US has long employed counter-insurgency warfare to stabilise social formations conducive to US political and economic interests. In short, counter-insurgency warfare is the military strategy par excellence for the policing and reproduction of global capitalism via localised proxy forces throughout the third world. In Colombia this strategy continues to have profound consequences for human rights, social justice and democracy.
Crossing the Americas: The U.S. war on terror and Arab cross-border mobilizations in a South American frontier region
George W. Bush hardly finished his declaration of war on terror when the U.S. government turned its attention toward a trinational region where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet, called the triple frontera (Triple Border, in Spanish) and the triplice fronteira (in Portuguese). My article traces how border residents of Muslim Lebanese origins responded to this post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorist encompassment. I suggest that Arabs publicly mobilized through three media- and state-sponsored initiatives that sought to combat U.S.-derived suspicions. Beginning in September 2001, they led the Peace without Frontiers movement, bringing together some forty-five thousand Triple Border residents; in late 2002, they participated in a border city government’s lawsuit against the Cable News Network (CNN) for defamation; and in mid-2003, they supported the publicity campaign that satirized the alleged visit of Osama bin Laden. Arabs crossed ethnic and national boundaries in order to collaborate with South American media and state powers against the U.S. war on terror. At the same time U.S. counterterrorism traversed the continent, Brazilians and Paraguayans of Arab origins mobilized across the post-9/11 Americas as well.
United States Strategic Interests in Latin America: An Assessment
s of 1997, the United States faces an unprecedented degree of security, stability, and economic prosperity in its relations with Latin America. Never before have US strategic interests in Latin America been as well-protected or have its prospects seemed, at least on the surface, so promising. Yet while the US strategic interests are in better shape militarily, politically, and economically this decade than at any time since the end of the Second World War, some problems remain. Over the long run, there is also the risk that old problems, which today seem to have ebbed away, will return. Thus, the positive tone of any contemporary assessment must be tempered with an awareness of remaining areas of concern as well as of possible future crises.