U.S. corporate warfare is underhanded, sinister

They said it wouldn't be another Vietnam. They said American soldiers would not be put in harm's way in the middle of another country's civil war. Well, technically they were right.

CARLOS VILLALON/NEWSMAKERS FARC guerillas are at war with the Columbian government.

Under "Plan Colombia," created in January of last year, the American government pledged $1.3 billion to aid the government of Colombia in its battle with the insurgent Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) in the hopes of stabilizing the war-torn country and dealing a severe blow to the cocaine and heroin export industry. Plan Colombia is far more generous with money than manpower: it only allows for about 300 American military personnel to be in the country, and most of those are deep within safe territory, generally at base camps training Colombian paramilitary units or helping the army with surveillance equipment.

However, the State Department has hired American mercenary contractors to help the Colombian military do the dirty work in the field. Dyncorp, a Virginia-based firm that supplies the civilian personnel involved in such efforts, is being paid $600 million to provide helicopter pilots for search and rescue operations as well as heroin and cocaine fumigation missions. As civilians, they are not allowed to man helicopter guns, and may only carry sidearms for self-defense. Their missions often bring them deep into rebel territory.

It is clear that America's involvement in the war is being "outsourced" to these civilian contractors to take political pressure off of the operation. If an American serviceman were killed in Colombia, it would be plastered all over the news media. If a Dyncorp employee were to get greased—hey, it goes with the territory. The prestige of the military is not compromised. A politically potent attack on the U.S. Army becomes a Dyncorp "work-related fatality." There may be just as many body bags either way, but the political resonance of their thud upon American soil will be greatly diminished if the stiffs inside are hired contractors rather than conscripted soldiers.

But there is a real danger in using private contractors: it makes rapid escalation more politically palatable, and thus more likely to fall below the public radar. The current limit on corporate mercenaries in Colombia is 500, but U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Anne Patterson has already made it clear to Congress that this number will soon have to be raised. And don't expect the fat cats on Capitol Hill to try to stop the escalation. Washington was pumped with corporate money to push Plan Colombia through the legislature last year—defense contractors such as United Technologies Corp., Textron, and Lockheed Martin have given millions of dollars to the Republican and Democratic parties to assure that their multi-million dollar defense contracts keep rolling in.

What's worse, the current laws restricting mercenaries from operating assault weapons cannot be guaranteed. Dyncorp and other such mercenary groups are able to conduct their missions with a total absence of media scrutiny. Back in 1998, a U.S. reporter tried to talk with a Dyncorp representative in Colombia and was subsequently threatened with banishment by the American embassy. Even the actual text of the contract between Dyncorp and the State Department is classified for reasons of national security. This restricted access means that the only ones keeping tabs on corporate contractors are the people in the government who hire them. This leaves open the possibility of secret arrangements in which Dyncorp employees are allowed to break the rules about participating in military aggression—to essentially obtain the rights afforded full-blown soldiers. This, coupled with the almost inevitable increase in the number of American contractors in Colombia, means that a large-scale American mercenary army, completely protected from public scrutiny and immune to political consequences, may not be far from realization.

Critics of Plan Colombia have been drawing parallels to the Vietnam War, using hauntingly familiar words such as "limited war" and "quagmire" to describe the conflict. Yet the mistakes of Vietnam, as horrific as they were, ultimately led to government accountability. That war's mistakes disgraced two presidents and led to a widespread distrust in the American government that has been with us ever since. Plan Colombia, however, is using the power of the dollar to cover political fallibility and, perhaps, create in Colombia something far worse than the immoral transgressions of Vietnam: an amoral corporate army separated from the public service of government, extricated from the political consequences of armed violence, and operating under a contract that no one is allowed to see.

If the American government is going to dabble in Colombia's affairs, it needs to show all its cards instead of hiding behind secret contracts with private firms. If Colombia's war is one worth fighting, then this country ought to put the lives of its own sons and daughters on the line in the name of the United States of America. But if war in Colombia is not something that they can sell to Congress or the American public at large—real war, with a real army and real military casualties—then maybe they shouldn't be there in the first place. Alex DeMille, TD '02, is an Opinion editor of the Herald.

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