DB: Talk about evolving U.S. policy in Colombia. The Interhemispheric Resource Center in Albuquerque has issued a statement: “U.S. Policy in Colombia: Towards a Vietnam Quagmire.” Do you think that’s an appropriate analogy? The New York Times writes in an editorial titled “Dangerous Plans for Colombia” that the aid to Colombia “risks dragging the United States into a costly counterinsurgency war.”

NC: I don’t like the phrase “Vietnam quagmire” for Vietnam or Colombia. Were the Russians caught in a quagmire in Afghanistan? They shouldn’t have invaded. The problem with the Afghan war is not that the Russians got caught in a quagmire. It’s that they shouldn’t have invaded the country. The same is true of the U.S. and Vietnam. The fact that it became costly to the U.S., which is what a quagmire means, is irrelevant. The U.S. invaded South Vietnam and destroyed it, along with much of the rest of Indochina. So I think we ought to keep away from the phrase.

DB: Interestingly, the IRC is an alternative organization.

NC: They do wonderful work, but the problem in Colombia is not whether the U.S. will get dragged into a war. That’s a minor issue. The major issue is what this is all about. Take a look at today’s New York Times and Boston Globe. Both papers happen to have articles about this issue, although I’m not sure they entirely realize the connection. The Times has an article on Bolivia, where farmers are staging big protests. One background reason is that there are farmers who have been compelled to grow coca because there are no other options. The U.S. has come in with crop destruction programs and counterinsurgency operations which have destroyed their coca crops, and now they’re starving. So they’re among those who are protesting, though the immediate causes are different.

Bolivia is one of the poorest countries of the world. So first they are driven to coca production by the “Washington consensus” and IMF/World Bank programs which say, You’ve got to open your country up to agriculture and other imports and you have to be a rational peasant producing for the agro-export market trying to maximize profit. You put those conditions together and it spells c-o-c-a. A rational peasant producing for the agro-export market when the country is being flooded by subsidized Western agricultural production is going to be producing coca. Then the West comes in and violently wipes it out, and they end up with peasants protesting in the streets. That’s what is going on in Bolivia.

The Boston Globe has a good article on Colombia by a reporter in one of the areas that’s targeted for the new program where the United States is planning to come in to destroy the crops. That’s actually a cover for eliminating the guerrillas. These are areas that are under guerrilla control and have been for a long time.

DB: This is the FARC, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas.

NC: There’s another guerrilla organization, the ELN, Ejército de Liberación Nacional, but it’s mainly FARC. Those are the areas that are targeted by the new program. The paramilitaries are up to their neck, as the military is, in narco-trafficking, but they’re not targeted by the program. So the military program happens to be concentrated in the areas of guerrilla control and not the areas of military and paramilitary control, although it’s well known that they’re deep into narco-trafficking in pretty much the same way the guerrillas are, namely the paramilitaries tax production, just like the guerrillas. In fact, the involvement of the guerrillas in coca production is just that they tax everything.

What does the Boston Globe article on Colombia say? Colombia peasants are terrified because there are rumors going around that the U.S.-Colombian program is going to start fumigating. If they fumigate, it’s going to be like Bolivia. That will destroy their crops. In fact, they’ll destroy not only the coca crops but maybe other crops.

The chemical and biological warfare that the U.S. carries out, and that’s what it is, may say it’s going after coca, but it has unknown consequences for the rest of the ecology. It’s an experiment, after all, and these are third world people. You just carry out experiments. You don’t know what’s going to happen. If it destroys the forests, too bad, we’ll change the mix next time. So Colombians are terrified that the programs are going to wipe out their livelihoods. They probably don’t know about Bolivia, but then they’ll be like Bolivian peasants whose protests are described in the New York Times.

These are two New York Times-owned newspapers, incidentally, so we’re talking about two branches of the New York Times discussing different aspects of the policy as it affects the poor people, the peasants.

Here we’re getting to the issues, not the quagmire. Whether the U.S. manages to keep troops out of it and lets the Colombian army do the dirty work or not is not the issue. The policies are not nicer if the Colombian military and its paramilitary associates carry out the policies under U.S. direction, funding, and pressure. The Colombian government is dragging its feet, not very happy, apparently, about the U.S. insistence on destruction and counterinsurgency rather than, say, funding of alternative crops.

The U.S. will support the military and hence, indirectly, the paramilitaries. It is not disputed, not controversial, that they are responsible for the overwhelming mass of the atrocities. They’re mostly attributed to the paramilitaries, but the paramilitaries who are very closely linked to the military. Human Rights Watch has a report that documents the ties between high military authorities and the paramilitaries. Farming out atrocities to paramilitaries is standard operating procedure. Serbia in Kosovo and Indonesia in East Timor are two recent examples.

DB: Almost paralleling Central America, would you say?

NC: In many ways. There are different mixtures in different countries. So the U.S. war against Nicaragua had to use U.S.-run paramilitaries, the contras, because the usual repressive force, the army, wasn’t available, and the U.S. public wouldn’t tolerate direct invasion, like the Kennedy-Johnson attack against South Vietnam. But in El Salvador, they just used the army.

DB: And affiliated death squads.

NC:They’re kind of like paramilitaries. Often they are straight military officers. In Colombia, the resort to paramilitaries actually traces back to the Kennedy administration. It had been a very violent place with a hideous history. In 1962, the Kennedy administration sent a team to Colombia headed by General William Yarborough of Special Forces. He advised the Colombian military on how they should deal with their domestic problems. His recommendations, which were then implemented, with joint training and so on, were that the security forces were to be trained to “as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents.” This means union leaders and peasant organizers, priests and teachers and human rights activists. That’s understood. The Kennedy administration proposal, then implemented, was to use military and paramilitary terror against that sector of the population, and that led to a change in the violence. It got a lot worse, which is recognized by Colombian human rights activists.

Then comes the period of mostly U.S. influence on the system, and it has been pretty awful. Just in the 1990s there have been at least a million and a half refugees forced out. The political killings run around ten a day, mostly by paramilitaries and military. Colombia is potentially a very rich country, but there’s a huge amount of poverty, suffering, and starvation. That’s the basis for the guerrilla movements, which are quite strong by now. The U.S. is now moving in to try to destroy them.

Incidentally, there’s another question that ought to be raised. What right do we have to do anything in Colombia? There happens to be a lethal drug produced in the United States that is killing far more people than cocaine. The Supreme Court just described it as the major health hazard in the United States–tobacco. We force that on other countries of the world. Countries in, say, East Asia not only have to accept our lethal drugs but they have to accept advertising for them, advertising aimed at vulnerable populations, like women and children.

These issues came up at the same time that President Bush was announcing the latest phase of the drug war with great fanfare. With virtually no media coverage, the U.S. Trade representative conducted hearings on the refusal of Thailand to accept advertising for U.S. lethal drugs. They were threatened with trade sanctions, which are murderous for them, if they don’t accept U.S.-produced drugs, which in reality means advertising, too, whatever the words may be.

In effect, it’s as if the Colombian cartel could insist that we import cocaine and allow them to post billboards in Times Square showing how cool it is for kids to use it. Suppose China, where millions of people are being killed by our lethal drug, would say, OK, we’re going to go into North Carolina and carry out counterinsurgency operations and chemical and biological warfare to destroy the drugs that you are forcing on us. You’ve even forced advertising on us. Do they have a right to do that? If they don’t have that right, how do we have a right to do anything in Colombia?

That’s the most elementary question that ought to be asked. That is never raised. At least I can’t find it. Even the critics of the new program don’t go that far. But that’s not going far.

We recognize that China doesn’t have that right. If China tried to claim such a right, we’d probably nuke them. But we’re supposed to have that right. Again, going back to the beginning of our discussion, these are the kinds of things that people ought to be asking themselves. And they’re not profound. It’s not like quantum physics. It is right on the surface that we have absolutely no right to do a thing in Colombia.

If we have a problem with drugs, that problem is here. And it’s known how to deal with it. A famous Rand Corporation study found that rehabilitation programs are seven times as cost-effective as criminalization, eleven times as effective as border interdiction, and twenty-three times as effective as source-country control. But that’s not what’s wanted. Policymakers want harsh punitive measures at home, and military helicopters and crop destruction abroad.

If we have a problem here, deal with it here, not only with rehabilitation and education but also with looking at the socioeconomic basis of it. There are reasons why people turn to self-destructive drugs, so take a look at those. These are all problems within the United States. They give us no justification for carrying out chemical and biological warfare and military action in other countries, whether that military action is done by proxy or not.

David Barsamian lives in Boulder, CO and is the producer of the award-winning syndicated radio program, Alternative Radio. He is also a regular contributor to The Progressive and Z Magazine. This interview is excerpted from his new book, Propaganda and the Public Mind, Conversations with Noam Chomsky.