The U.S. military has been working to make the Colombian armed forces more effective by training army battalions and sending 18 Blackhawk helicopters and 42 Huey military transports to the shaky regime in Bogotá, part of a $1.3 billion infusion of funds engineered under the Clinton administration. The rule change pending in Congress would also allow the U.S. military to provide additional electronic surveillance to Colombian forces. The Bush administration has requested that Congress authorize another $1 billion for military equipment and training.

Bush is also providing $98 million to train an elite rapid response brigade to protect Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum's oil pipeline that runs from the interior of Colombia to the coast.

Colombia is the center of a wider military intervention in Latin America, as U.S. imperialism repositions forces previously stationed at its military base in Panama, which was also the home of the U.S. Southern Command. Other bases and troop concentrations are located in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Honduras. U.S. forces conduct hundreds of military maneuvers throughout Latin America every year.

The new moves in Washington came as the government of Colombian president Andrés Pastrana ordered a major military offensive against territories occupied by the opposition guerrilla army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Prodded by Washington and emboldened by the U.S. government's "war on terrorism," the regime in Bogotá retook major towns in a large swath of the country earlier ceded as part of negotiations with the opposition army.  
 
Right-wing death squads
Press reports indicate that the army occupied the towns "behind a bombing campaign against guerrilla targets," but ran into little resistance as FARC units regrouped in smaller villages. Townspeople told a reporter for the Washington Post that as the guerrillas withdrew, members of the right-wing paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia moved in and started asking them to identify supporters of the opposition. "Almost at once," the Post reported, the rightists "began commandeering motorcycles from local residents, and people began disappearing."

The United Self-Defense Forces, numbering some 15,000, have terrorized peasants in the countryside and targeted trade unionists and supporters of left-wing organizations. Last year paramilitary forces killed 177 trade unionists.

The paramilitaries' kidnapping in February of Gilberto Torres, a leader of the main oil workers union in Colombia, sparked a 14-day strike of some 3,000 oil workers against the state-owned Empresa Colom–biana de Petróleos.

Paramilitary leaders publicly admitted kidnapping Torres and announced that he would be put through a "paramilitary trial" for aiding the guerrillas. The public protests against the kidnapping forced the paramilitary groups to release Torres on April 7 to a government commission. Earlier, the oil workers had rejected a government proposal to return to work, pledging to continue the protests until the government guarantees the lives of its employees from the threat of the paramilitary groups.

U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western hemisphere affairs Otto Reich gave the regime cover for the offensive by claiming there "is no insurgency in Colombia. What you have is three terrorist groups." Washington has placed the FARC and another smaller guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army, along with the United Self-defense Forces, on its list of terrorist organizations.

Secretary of State Colin Powell told a congressional hearing that with the end of the safe havens, "of course the Colombians have come to us with new requests: increased intelligence-sharing and other support we might be able to provide them."

Despite claims that the Bush administration would not seek a change in current legislation preventing U.S. personnel from assisting military units suspected of human rights abuses, the Pentagon has sought "advics and assist" authorization for Colombian forces on the ground, similar to what is being done in the Philippines. There are officially up to 400 U.S. military personnel and 400 civilians in Colombia providing training and support in the so-called war on drug trafficking.

Laying the groundwork for further U.S. intervention in the region, President Pastrana proposed the establishment of a "joint security effort" among the Andean countries at a meeting in Lima also involving U.S. president Bush and the presidents of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. The proposal envisions cooperation on military operations, intelligence, and policing.  
 
 
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