In bed with the cartels:

A former U.S. Green Beret charges American troops are training cocaine-financed Columbian military death squads

by Alex Roslin - Hour.ca August 15, 2002

When Stan Goff was sent to Colombia and Peru as a member of the U.S. Army's famed Green Berets, he was amazed by the corruption and violence of the local troops he was training.

Now, as the U.S. government seeks to boost military aid to Colombia's hard-line new president .varo Uribe V.ez, Goff is telling his story in hopes of provoking debate about what the U.S. is up to in Latin America.

Goff, a Vietnam vet and one-time sniper in the top-secret Delta Force, says that in Colombia the U.S. has gotten into bed with one of the most corrupt and violent regimes on the planet, whose military is joined at the hip with right-wing death squads which, in turn, are financed by cocaine cartels.

In an interview from his home in Raleigh, North Carolina, Goff said that no one on the ground in Colombia actually believes Washington's official claim that it is in Colombia to fight a war on drugs.

"Nobody we talked to down there ever talked about drugs. That seemed to be the furthest thing from their minds. All they talked about was the guerrillas," he said.

Goff said the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC - the country's largest leftist guerrilla group - has nowhere near the same involvement in drugs as Colombia's notoriously corrupt military or the country's network of right-wing paramilitary death squads, known as the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC.

He said FARC's involvement in drugs comes mainly from taxing peasant coca farmers, but the real money is in processing coca leaves into cocaine and smuggling it into the U.S.

This remains the exclusive preserve of the big cocaine cartels, which fund the AUC death squads, he said. "These are guys with suits who run banks," Goff said of Colombia's cocaine barons. "They have no interest in some socialist insurgency gaining power."

But despite the American anti-drug rhetoric, Goff said the U.S. has shown relatively scant interest in taking on the big Colombian cocaine cartels or the AUC, which co-ordinates its bloody missions closely with the U.S.-backed military.

"The doctrine [the Green Berets were] teaching is counter-insurgency doctrine, not counter-narcotics doctrine. We would have at least been showing them how a drug lab is laid out. But we ourselves didn't know. I couldn't have told you how to make cocaine," he said.

Goff's 24-year military career has taken him from Vietnam to stints as a special-forces advisor in Colombia, Peru, Honduras and Venezuela, a Delta Force member in El Salvador and Guatemala, a Ranger in Somalia and a special-forces peacekeeper in Haiti. Since retiring in 1996 as a master sergeant, Goff has become a progressive organizer and spoken at anti-war conferences about his story.

Goff had an eye-opening experience when he was sent to Peru in 1991 to train an elite Peruvian special-forces battalion. Goff said the Peruvians had a gruesome record of killing indigenous people in the country's mountainous interior, a fact well known to the U.S. special-forces trainers who received a full briefing on all the Peruvians they taught.

"I'm not sure they could have been more violent. President [Alberto] Fujimori was giving the army a blank cheque to go into the countryside and lay waste to it," said Goff.

The battalion was racially segregated, with the officers almost exclusively European while the troops were black and indigenous. As conscripts with poor tactical training, the Peruvians didn't like engaging any guerrillas head-on, said Goff. Instead, their specialty was "death-squad-style tactics" against civilians, which he described as "severely repressive measures, up to and including massacres of the indigenous population. It turned into a race war.

"We walked past a graveyard one day and one of the officers said, 'That's where all the friendly Indians are.'"

The Peruvian officers were also heavily corrupt - "essentially the mafia with a uniform" - and did nothing to conceal their violence or corruption from the Americans. "They would hold huge parties with unlimited booze every night, drunkenly boasting about how many people they killed," he said.

If that wasn't enough, the U.S. training showed the Peruvians how to be even "more repressive toward the population," said Goff.

After his two-month stint in Peru, Goff was sent for two months to Colombia to train two special-forces battalions in air-mobile assault and night fighting. Stationed at the Tolemaida base, 60 kilometres southwest of Bogot? Goff said the Colombian units were just as racially segregated, corrupt and violent as in Peru.

Goff said Colombian military commanders closely co-ordinate their operations with the paramilitary death squads, with whom they "fight side-by-side. The army establishes the cordon sanitaire and the AUC goes in, does what they do and goes on their merry way. They are allowing the paramilitaries to do their wet work so they have plausible denial."

Source: http://www.hour.ca/magazine/index.asp?id=1718&parution=1032