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October 07, 2004
State's Marc Grossman on Colombian human rights groups
The PBS program Wide Angle broadcast a show on Colombia last month, and accompanied it with a very useful website. Among the pictures and articles you can find there is a transcript of an interview with Marc Grossman, who as the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs is the highest-ranking foreign service officer in the State Department.
In the transcript, Grossman makes a rather remarkable assertion to interviewer Carol Marin.
Carol Marin: When you go, what do you see? What kind of Colombia do we see through your lens?Marc Grossman: Well, let me tell you one of the things that surprises me whenever I go to Colombia. And that is that each time when I visit Colombia, I always make time to meet with the human rights groups and the democracy groups and the church because I think it's very important that we hear their voices as well.
And one of the most interesting things that I have found is that in every one of those meetings, what do you hear? You hear people say, 'Stay engaged. It's right for America to be here.' And specifically they ask for more and more training of Colombian military forces. Because they know that the forces that we train understand human rights and understand democracy and understand their role in a democratic society. And I've been very interested over these six or seven times, and usually I see the same people, so I can judge what they are thinking and where they have come to. And not ever does anyone say, take your money, it's wrong.
Carol Marin: Get out of town?
Marc Grossman: No, they want more. They want you to train more Colombian military units, to be involved more in their society. I think that's a very interesting thing and something that always gives me a real cause for optimism.
“Get out of town” indeed. For seven years now, CIP has been in regular contact with most of Colombia’s best-known, most-cited human rights groups, and never – ever – has any of them even come close to asking for “more and more training of Colombian security forces.”
It’s perfectly impossible to imagine any of Colombia’s prominent human rights figures ever saying something like “You know our military? The one that keeps intelligence files on us and whose officers call us guerrilla collaborators? The one with a history of working with the paramilitaries who’ve killed our colleagues? Well, we think it’s great that the United States is training them. It’s just wonderful that all that light infantry training from U.S. Special Forces (the subject of about a third of U.S. training in 2003) is giving them more lethal skills. How terrific that contact with the United States is conferring such prestige and legitimacy on them. Do keep it up.”
They wouldn’t say that, ever. Not even in jest. Many – among them CODHES, CINEP, the Colombian Commission of Jurists, Planeta Paz, MINGA, and others – have been steadfast and consistent in their opposition to Plan Colombia.
Marc Grossman is not an ideologue. He’s a very capable career diplomat, not a Bush political appointee from the neocon fringe. While we’ve disagreed with many of his past statements about Colombia, he’s always been careful and measured in his assertions. But this one isn’t careful.
If Grossman had used the more vague term “non-governmental organizations” instead of human rights and democracy groups, his statement could technically be correct – the cattlemen’s federation, for instance, is non-governmental, but I’m sure they’d want more US military aid. If Grossman hadn’t specified that he’d heard calls for more military training at “every one” of his meetings, there might still be a way to make this statement resemble truth.
But he didn’t say that. The State Department’s number-three official actually wants us to believe that Colombia’s human rights community wants the United States to train more Colombian soldiers, and that they tell him so every time he visits.
This leaves two depressing possibilities. It could be that Marc Grossman is being misled by a very slanted, very limited selection of pro-military human-rights groups (and there must be some) when he goes to Colombia. If not, we can only conclude that he's gone on record telling a first-class whopper.
Posted by isacson at October 7, 2004 06:54 PM
Comments
Well, he said "You hear people say, 'Stay engaged'". That doesn't necessarily mean that he's referring to everyone present in those meetings, but that there were voices that held such beliefs in all, or almost all, of them. He chose to highlight the pro-U.S. comments and not the anti-U.S. ones, because it fits together with his argument. Just as anti-U.S. sites and spokesmen do the same, omitting information that runs contrary to their propositions.
Posted by: jcg at October 10, 2004 09:02 PM
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