And it was the American trained military units, such as the Atlacatl Battalion that compiled the worst human rights records, wiping out entire villages and then denying their responsibility with the help of U.S. officials. In the end, the bloody, divisive twelve year pursuit of military victory in El Salvador proved fruitless and the United States had to settle for a treaty brokered by the United Nations that granted the revolutionaries many of their demands. The civil war in Colombia has raged for over forty years, the product of the failure of successive governments to provide minimal standards of equity, stability and justice for the Colombian people. As in El Salvador, the Colombian civil war is more about massacres of civilians and selective assassinations than armed confrontation. Yet the Clinton administration wants to send 63 armed helicopters to spearhead a military campaign to drive the Colombian revolutionaries out of southern Colombia.
History constantly presents old problems in new disguises.
We did not heed this wise counsel in El Salvador. Let us not make the same mistake in Colombia. Robert E. White, a former ambassador to El Salvador and Paraguay, is president of the Center for International Policy in Washington. Contact Us and Support Our Work Search the Site Find page with all or any of the keywords.