Around the world, terrorism has become an increasingly greater threat to humanity. In this conference, Jon Perdue examines various definitions of terrorism and reviews the history and impact of terrorist activity in Latin America, especially in Argentina, Peru, and Colombia. He also explains how claims of human rights violations are often used as political tools. Perdue briefly touches on the subject of self-defense and its role in combating violence. In his conclusions, he states that prosperity is the most important factor in combating terrorism.
Jon Perdue
Jon Perdue is director of Latin America Programs of The Fund for American Studies. He has wide experience in researching about economical, political and educational issues. He was policy research associate for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and also served as managing editor of the Michigan Education Report. His articles have been published on various journals, including Investors Business Daily and Atlanta-Journal Constitution. Currently, he serves on the Policy and Economics Council of the Gerson Lehrman Group of New York. Perdue holds a degree in Finance from North Georgia Military College and State University.
Public Politics against Terrorism, Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking Jon Perdue
Dr. Manuel Ayau Building, room 401 Universidad Galileo Guatemala, March 18, 2009
A New Media - UFM production. Guatemala, March 2009 Camera: Joni Vasquez, Manuel Alvarez; digital editing: Adrián Méndez; index and synopsis: Sergio Bustamante; content reviser: Sebastian del Buey, Daphne Ortiz; publication: Mario Pivaral / Carlos Petz
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License Este trabajo ha sido registrado con una licencia Creative Commons 3.0
Transcript
Today we're going to talk about terrorism, human rights and the right of self-defense and I want to start out by saying, I realize that the subject is hard
to be impartial about, and I realize that some of you may not come from the same point of view that I do, so I've taken that into account in this presentation.
So, what I want to do is explain maybe some facts you've not heard before. I want to explain it from the point of view that, I and many others come from, and
the other thing that we'll do is figure out where we agree on this subject.
And how we can agree in the future and what we can do to work on this, no matter which side you come from.
The first thing is, the first question is: when is it justifiable to take up arms against the state, or is it ever? Keep that question in mind as we try to
find this.
What defines tyranny of the state? Is that an objective or subjective measure? Is one man's terrorist another man's freedom fighter? I don't know how to
translate that in Spanish but that's a phrase that comes up often when people are trying to define this term.
And as for the question is, there really is no definition that's agreed upon; we have, depending on your point of view, where you're from, what your culture
is.
Neither the UN nor the OAS nor any of the major inter-American organizations have been able to define terrorism satisfactorily to everybody involved.
Here's an example from Colin Powell: "Terrorists reject democracy, reject openness, and have abandoned civilized means of making their opinions known through
the killings of innocent people".
In a much more academic explanation here, I won't go through all of it here but the point I want to make is, it's impossible to define and in general, in
this subject area, nobody has successfully defined it. So, we're going to come at it from that point of view.
I thought this chart was interesting for Latin America here, so much about the Middle East, things like that. From '95 to 2001 the majority of terrorist
incidents were in America Latina.
What I want to do next is, let's go over concepts and help me decide what's terrorism and what's not; recruiting or allowing children to serve in combat, yes
or no? Terrorism?
It is an example of the FARC, I thought was interesting, if you read the irony of the sign, here looks like a 12-year-old girl, FARC member, saying "Don't
mistreat the children, they're our future".
Deliberately targeting children as a method of maximizing terror, can we all agree that that's certainly terrorist? These are photos from the Beslan Massacre
in the South-Ossetia region of what used to be the Russian Federation.
What happened is that the Secondary School No. 1 was seized by a group of Chechen terrorists, the seize ended when the Russian security forces went in and
334 civilians in all were killed, and 186 of them were children.
And it was targeted to a school for maximum effect. Now think, beyond the shed of a doubt, we can come to a consensus that any of these forms and acts are
terrorism. Planting bombs with intent to kill or injure civilians not involved in either side of a conflict, yes?
Kidnapping for ransom as means of funding, can we all agree that that's terrorism as well? It's crime if it's not involved with any formalized group, if it's
from a terrorist organization, it's certainly terrorism. Yes?
The recruitment or targeting of children in any situation, at any time. Yes? It should be remembered also that between the state and the insurgency, which of
the two initiated the violence, this is from my point of view, but I felt like it needed to be stated.
And everyone of these... the history of terrorism in Latin America, these insurgencies start as, it can be Marxists, Leninists, Maoists, doesn't matter.
Some of these in Peru, it was a made up... Chairman Gonzalo made up his own philosophy; so, it doesn't matter where it comes from, but one side starts and
the other reacts, and from there the violence increases and escalates.
Armies are not designed to fight insurgencies but to defend the country in a time of war with external aggressors. So, an army is designed to fight other
countries, it´s not designed as a anti or counter-insurgency organization.
The popularity of the ideology of the terrorist group, inside or outside of its own country, should have no bearing on its legitimacy. Can we all agree on
that.
Alright, I want to talk a little bit about human rights as a political tool. What's called Judicial Warfare or Guerra judicial, is when non-governmental
organizations or truth and reconociliation commissions are utilized as a political tool that are biased, that are not, they're set up and they are people, and they´e funded by groups that are
antithetical to one side or the other.
In 1977, in the first year of Jimmy Carter's presidency in the United States, one of the representatives of the United Nations stated that human rights would
be used to help leftists revolutionaries in the western hemisphere; so back, at least 30 years ago, this concept was beginning to be used, the term human rights, as a political weapon. So it
has a long history.
Richard Holbrook, who was just appointed by the Obama administration as the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and he, this was back during
the cold war, probably in the late seventies,
he testified to a congressional committee that "in the name of human rights a small local group of people sought to carry out a far-reaching change in the
world structure", and I emphasized this, "their targets were almost always regimes of the right, which happened to be anti-Soviet".
And where we can also agree is, I don't care if it´s from the right or the left, truth and reconciliation commissions; NGOs that monitor human rights abuses
or crimes against humanity, should be always balanced, not biased, one way or the other.
I don't want my people on there to use it as a weapon nor I want the other side´s people to be on there.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was a democrat senator and tends to be, was one of the promoters of these human rights monitors, and through the
reconciliation commission wrote back in the late seventies; "More and more of the United States seems only to know of violations of human rights in countries where it is still possible to
protest such violations".
So you have, a places like, for instance Cuba, which is a favorite example, but people are in jail for wanting to make a library in their home, things like
that, we can all agree that that´s certainly a violation of human rights.
Argentina, I'm going over some cases here of a little bit of the history of Latin American of terrorism. In the seventies there were 17 different armed
groups, just in Argentina, and the two that kind of rose up out of that mix to become the largest were the EDP and the Montoneros.
And they became so large that, at one point, they started to fabricate or manufacture their own weapons and their own explosives.
And they got so good at it, that they cut a deal with the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization to, in exchange for shipping bomb-making material, and
these well-done explosives they had figured how to manufacture, they would send the Montoneros to Palestine to be trained in terrorism by the Palestinian terrorist groups.
From 73 to 75, they carried out an average of seven terrorist attacks per day; they extorted US$ 80 million just from kidnapping and ransom operations,
that's close to a record in Latin America.
You think the FARC, by capturing Ingrid Betancourt and the three American contractors does eliminate in the seventies, that´s probably even a larger sum if
it´s in real money?
They bombed a military plane in the runway with 114 military passengers on board. So, this was a group to be reckoned with. This picture of Yasir Arafat, who
is the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization with Montoneros in the seventies.
This is from Victoria Villareal, is the President of an NGO that's taken this case up to try to get rid of this bias in the truth and reconciliation
commissions and NGO monitoring groups.
She says, "In Argentina, the situation of human rights is interpreted in such a restrictive way that they are only pertinent to the armed forces."
She's saying that the terrorists escape any accusations of lesa humanidad or violations of human rights or any of those concepts and they're not prosecuted
nor they´re indemnify by the state, neither are their victims indemnified.
Someone that placed bombs and assassinated innocents can file a lawsuit against the State and can get the person that was defending those innocents put in
jail, and moreover can legally force his victims to pay him an indemnification.
So, in a lot of Latin America that´s been the situation where you've got one side that can not only initiate conflict, do the most horrendous acts, and 20
years later, when they're all settled down, they can, now ,file lawsuits, and their victim ends up going to jail, or the people that were in charge to protect those people, end up in jail and
having to pay the terrorists families for indemnification.
"Not only are many of the ex-terrorists are walking free, many of them are serving in the Kirchner government and monopolizing the CVR and NGOs that report
to the state on human rights".
This is going to get into my point of view also on this, but I feel like I need to show you what that is exactly to get this point across.
This is from, La otra parte de la verdadby Nicolas Marquez, this is just a list of current or former serving ex-Montoneros in the Kirchner government and if
you see this statistics that they did, it´s just in the seventies, they were not existing that long.
Martin Gras, for those who... los militares aquí,Martin Gras was an ex-Montonero, that is now in the Kirchner government.
And the ironic part of this, and I had to show you, is that he's not only the Sub Secretary for human rights; but he's been charged now by the Kirchner
Government, to redevelop the military curriculum at all the air force army and marine schools in Argentina, to give it more emphasis on a humanistic point of view or humanistic view of
war.
I'm going to talk a little bit about Peru. Peru had some of the most violent times in the 1980s, than any other country in Latin America.
Sendero Luminoso or the Shining Path, was the largest terrorist group there; they conducted 20 thousand terrorist acts; almost 20 thousand dead, an official
Shining Path document recounted, in ten years of armed violence, they claim for themselves 125 thousand acts.
Los emerretistas or MRTA or the Tupac Amaru terrorists, began in 1984 and these were disgruntled ex-members of the leftist political parties, the communist
parties or the Sendero Luminoso.
And they were the second largest. In 1980, the Shining Path, took a voting registration office in Chuschi, where they burned the voter records,
they launched activities under the slogan " Elections no, People'yes". I thought it was ironic enough to show to you as well.
The goal was complete destruction of the Old State to build the New State, inspired by the philosophy, this was what I was getting at; make shift
philosophies: Marx, Lenin, and Mao Tse-Tung, but modified a little bit to fit the situation of Peru.
If you've heard of the operation Chavin de Huantar, it was in 1997, that the emerretistas took over the residence of the Japanese ambassador, during a
party.
And after months of negotiation, the government under Fujimori conducted operation Chavin de Huantar, named after an ancient city in Peru, where they dug
tunnels all under the city and what they did was, dug tunnels up under the house of the ambassador.
And they had actually, who's the current Vice-President Giampietri, was a naval officer and he was one of the hostages, and they smuggled in through food, I
think it were pizza boxes or something like that, a little microphone and a miniature two-way radio.
So, he was able to communicate with the commandoes and with the military throughout the operation, and tell them how many terrorists there are... He was
able...the main thing he did was, that five minutes before the military or the commandoes performed this operation, he was able to get the hostages all together.
Because what was going to happen, if there was any movement from the military or from commandoes, what the emerretistas were planning to do was, they had all
the hostages on one level, their stated plan, openly, was to take their AK-47s up the stairs and murder them all immediately, kill them all don't leave any alive.
So Giampietri was able to communicate to them, get the hostages together, tell them where the terrorists were and they executed an almost impeccable commando
operation that was considered throughout the world, as one of the best.
At the time, it was the equivalent to what just happened in Colombia with the rescue of Betancourt and the other hostages, and I don't like to highlight
Betancourt or the Americans, there were plenty others that were just as important.
But it was considered one of the most successful in history; I want to make that point. Only one hostage died in the operation and that was from a heart
attack, no others were killed.
The success of the operation was later clouded by allegations that at least three, and possibly eight of the rebels, this is what they call it, had been
summarily executed by the commandoes after they were surrendering.
There's, of course, two sides of this account and the hostages tell one and the emerretistas tell the other, that once the first wall was breached, an
explosion happened, they were immediately running to the third floor to murder the hostages; so, this is a matter of dispute,
I want to get both sides up there. In 2002, the court absolved all of them, these were heroes in Peru, and they took them to court, they won, they were
exonerated completely.
In response, the family members of the terrorists, filed a suit in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the CIDH, accusing them of human rights
violations, and the case is still pending.
It´s so interesting to me, and I want to establish the links here that I had to tell you this, the first to go to the press, and this was right after the
operation, it has been 12 years now almost since the operation, this was in 1997, was Eligia Rodriguez Bustamante, was the deputy director of APRODEH. I don't know if you've heard of APRODEH,
but we´re going to talk about them in a minute, this is a human rights NGO in Peru.
This was the one that helped get the emerretistas off the list in the European Parliament, and they're the same ones that filed the law suit with the
CIDH.
It was later revealed that Rodriguez's daughter was one of the emerretista terrorists that was in the operation. APRODEH later petitioned the European
Parliament to take emerretistasoff the terrorist list, this just happened months ago and it´s been a controversy, not just in Peru, but worldwide.
The letter that APRODEH wrote, "The MRTA has been inactive for eight years, its main leaders are in prison, some have served their sentences, and dozens are
no longer linked to the organization and are living in many different places around the world".
It sounds like they've done their time, they've served their sentences, let's leave them alone. But when it comes to the other side, the military that were
there under the charge of the government to protect the citizenry, they still go after them, and 20 years later it doesn't matter.
To say the least, the claim is misleading, if you want to write down and then want to go look, that's the official website, where they do all the
communicates still from the emerretista terrorists.
I thought this was good enough to explain, this is the other side of the point of view; "terrorist groups use every imaginable strategy to stop, thwart or
discredit any counter subversive operation that the armed forces might conduct, and try to portray the armed forces as the only party guilty of massive human rights violations".
The thesis of most of this is that the only guilty party are actors of the state, it cannot be the terrorists or any like that.
We're going to get to the point where I'm going to show you where is not only state actors, is not only military or state police, or any special forces
group, that are set up to fight terrorism, but they can even get tangentially from their... anybody that was ever, that ever gave evidence or helped the police investigation.
"To accomplish that objective, terrorist groups use military uniforms to kidnap, murder and rob. They recruit individuals by force and then report it as
disappeared at the hands of the armed forces".
"They invent disappearances of non-existent persons. Here using different names, one person reported the disappearance of different people who never existed.
Terrorists commit murders and then leave behind evidence that incriminate the armed forces".
And let me say this too, it is a truth that the military, throughout the world and throughout Latin America in the last 40 years, there ´s been massive
violations by the military as well and every military person that I know these days condemn that with all their being, and they say that if there´s a violation, find it out, adjudicate it and
punish them to the severest law that you can.
But don't single them out, justice needs to be just for both sides.
I want to call on the Leahy Law, this is one of the major progenitors of this problem here in Latin America, as that the United States gives money to a lot
of the Latin American governments, everybody in the world gives money to each other, but the United States is the biggest, but they are also the biggest target.
But they fund training, they fund benign things, they don't give directly arms and things like that but they will do training exchanges. And one of the
senators there, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, in 1997 and again in 2001, placed language in another bill that was unrelated that was cut out funding, they would immediately stopped funding for any
kind of military training if there was any accusation of a human rights violation.
They have to immediately pull the general or the officer or the soldier from the battle field, until that case is adjudicated and it's finalized, which can
be, of course as you know, in the United States it can be years, in Latin America it´s even longer.
So what that allowed them to do is make false accusations, and all that does is, you take the general of the battlefield without firing a shot. So you got
your best military personnel affected solely by false accusations, what incentivizes false accusations to begin with.
The Paniaguan administration was the one just after Fujimori left to Japan and faxed in his resume, but all the accusations against military officers since
Paniagua and the Toledo government, only 70% have been found innocent, if 70% were found guilty, we would say that's a trend and this a massive problem.
But when you have 70% that have been accused, pulled from the battlefield, their lives ruined from having to spend their own money to defend themselves,
their salaries were cut in half, for the remainder of the time that they were in this judicial process, that's a trend and that states that there´s an even greater problem from the other
side.
You got false accusations ruining peoples lives that might be that the best generals, the ones defending the country against human rights violations.
Also, the case of General Bellido is probably the test case in all of Latin America, there´s been books written about it, he was just recently, completely
exonerated by the Supreme Court of Peru after 12 years of litigation.
I'm going to show you something, this goes over the years and the Huallaga Valley in Peru was the hot bed of emerretista terrorist, it it was the head, the
cuartel, of terrorism in the selva of Peru.
They sent General Bellido there, he actually started doing the thing that the military train for this days to avoid humans rights violations, which was you
win hearts and minds, you go help the local population, you show them you're not there against them, you do whatever they need, infrastructure buildings, whatever, anything you can do to help
that community so they´re not, it´s less like they´re won over to the side of the terrorist.
The unfortunate thing is you can´t remain impartial, you can't remain uninvolved in these out areas of Peru, and all over Latin America, you need to take one
side or the other, or you get killed.
So, General Bellidos was there very successful, cleaned out the whole Huallaga Valley of Peru, cleaned it out from terrorists.
He had ex-emerretistas there asking him to be the godfather of their children, and it was in newspapers in the Huallaga Valley, with the ex terrorists, he
had really passed by the country, and not only that; he had won back the local population, it was a success in any by sense of the word.
I'm going to show you some of the news clippings from the... and he was finally declared innocent.
And this was January 29 of this year. They just had an all services ceremony to honor him for his services, and to do mea culpafor all the years that they
have persecuted this man for nothing.
They´d accused him of... this was back in the eighties and the nineties, when there were just accusations flying. Every time someone would get accused, what
they would offer immediately was, "I have information...", because they knew there was not going to be justice for them.
The only weapon they had was "Okay I have higher-ups, I have people above me that have done worst things", so that also incentivizes or induces false
testimony.
Let's go to Colombia, in the news probably more than anywhere now, Alvaro Uribe, you would say by all accounts, he's done a very good job of handling the
terrorist problem there.
After his first year, the same type of human rights consorsium or groups of human rights NGOs came together and put a report together called the
Authoritarian Spell, and before I even show you, doesn't that sound a little biased or a little partial?
They did a series of three of these reports, the first, second, and third year of his administration, and it was that he was a dictator and everybody was
under a spell, there was really no real reason for the public to be 80% behind him, they were under his authoritarian spell.
And I wanted to show you this was taken from, only the first pages of a very long document, and in many NGOs and there´s unions, sindicatos, human rights
groups, down here there's an economic portion of this document...
We're talking about a human rights in an extremely, extremely serious subject and the group that, not only our State department of United States which makes
a mistake constantly of accepting the word of these groups, except this one, where you´ve got all this extraneous, unserious information included in this document.
Uribe went crazy when this report went out in the press, and he really was offended by it, and went to the press and asked the embassies and other
organizations "Please check the statistics we have completely different statistics, we´re doing the best that we can, we´re taking advice from everybody who has a stake in this situation, check
the statistics".
So the U.S. Embassy, this was a classified document for a long time, but I was able to access it, and I cut it out, and I want to go through this because it
illustrates perfectly as the best summary of the situation, not only in Colombia but in Peru, in Argentina, and most places in Latin America.
And I'm not going to read it but the criticism of NGOs laid bare the fundamental controversy of that right statistics in Colombia have often been at
variance,
the government says that 70% of the violations are committed by the terrorists, the NGOs say that the 70% are committed by the military. The statistics
diverse dramatically from what the government said versus what these human rights reports said and what it came down to was the method of gathering statistics.
Here's what it comes to, this is why I say the purpose of this lecture is to figure out where we agree and where we can come together and figure out, these
truth and reconciliation commissions are designed to bring closure to these events and to the violence that in Colombia it´s lasted from 1954 so, when you get reports like this that are still
bias, it continues the conflict.
Here's the important part I wanted to show you here, right there in the bottom of the page two, Strict Scene up, which is the major statistic gathering NGO
there about the subject, they strictly follow legal procedures that define human rights violations as crimes that can only be committed by the state or state-sponsored actors, which presumes
paramilitaries to be.
These paramilitaries, the AUC-AUC, began as self-defense groups where the FARC was taking over territory and robbing large-land-owners, and small-owners, and
peasants for that matter, out in the selva, en las afuerasof Colombia.
What that shows is that... human rights only to the government and any report of human rights violations reflects that distinction. Human rights crimes by
guerrillas are characterized as violations of International Humanitarian Law, which is a completely different violation and has no relevance to this whatsoever.
Deteriorating statistical variances here, depending on the definitions and they mention that there´s no way to discern this statistics unless you read the
first pages of legal terminology that was in the CINEP report that creates the minutia of what is a human rights violation.
You got examples here of where they went, they actually even did investigation of some of the accusations of human rights and they found one where they´d
accused people of, the military had gone and cut the guy's head off with a machete, actually he was a combatant, was armed, and was killed in a battle between the military forces and the
terrorists.
Guatemala, this is, I won't get into much about Guatemala, but I want to show you this taken here, this is the CH, I know it´s controversial here as
well.
But what I have here is what I´ve pulled out of... the state holds direct responsibility and here's where I wanted to show you what creates a problem. I
think both sides agree we want to end the problem, we want to do it justly, and we want to do it where it finalizes the problem and doesn´t create more problems that both sides can fight
over.
But look here, here's what I want to show you, "The state holds direct responsibility for the actions of civilians to whom it delegated, de jure or de
facto", these are legal terms that mean, it covers everybody, anybody that ever talked to the state.
If you gave testimony to a police officer that came by or a military investigator that came to investigate a, suppose a massacre in Guatemala and your
considered an actor of the state as well, so this is makes it where it covers everybody.
The selective indignation is another example of this, you have Pinochet and Fujimori considered rightists, derechistas; and both their administrations were
that way.
They had to create a new law to be able to capture these guys in foreign countries, outside their own country, then extradited back to their own country to
be prosecuted, now we can all agree that if we want to do that, fine, but let's not do one side or the other.
I brought, what I thought was interesting, I brought this book here, this is Talk of the Devil, this is a Spanish journalists wrote this book, Ricardo
Orizio, and this is, he found seven ex-dictators all leftists, Idi Amin Dada was one of them.
They run the gamma of all over the world, he went and interviewed them and they're all living lives of luxury, they killed thousands, they have the Cambodian
killing fills, you had Idi Amin supposedly cannibalizing his enemies. But these people are now just living in their retirement home, probably with Swiss bank accounts funding things like
that.
But I want to show you the contrast here, there are plenty of targets of opportunity as you say in the military, if you want to go after people, go after
them all, don´t go after one side or the other.
In the Middle East, almost the separate side, but I want to cover a little bit on what are the links between Islamic based terrorism and Maoist, Marxists,
Leninist, or what´s generally been the Latin American trend of terrorism.
For one thing this is, it is becoming now a whole, they're kind of renewing the relationship these days as you´ve seen, but I want to show that this has been
going on for a long time.
You had in 1966, in Chile, in El Congreso de Chillan, you had the Baath party of Syria there; which is a, the Baath party it´s dominant in a lot of the
Middle East,
and this is a leftist party as well, so they've been collaborating ever since the late sixties, at a minimum.
And you had the Tricontinental Conference in Havana, in 1966, it was kind of the genesis of international terrorism, where Yasir Arafat and the Palestinians
came with Fidel Castro to start training camps in Cuba and to train terrorists internationally.
You wouldn´t believe that people who´ve been through there, not only Yasir Arafat, but Carlos the Jackal, who was a Venezuelan terrorist that was most famous
throughout the last century and he's still alive, and in jail, in the Middle East, but you had...
the Baath party in 67, you had Ben Barka, was a Moroccan who decided to put together the Latin Americans with all of Africa, and Middle East, and he began
the idea of the Tricontinental Conference, and it took place in Havana.
This is the OSPAAAL which is a Cuban political movement that was founded in Havana, in January 1966, after that Tricontinental Conference. You had people
from all over the world that came to train on how to do terrorist acts.
The Cubans are far on the side of Arab States during the Yom Kipur War, they´ve sent military barriers to Palestine, and this has been going for a long
time.
Venezuela and Iran, you´ve got Hugo Chavez now is doing business deals with Ahmadi Nejad, of Iran; Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, has just put together a deal
of a cement plant in Nicaragua with him; narco-terrorism.
There's been extreme increases in drug shipments originating from Venezuela since the beginning of the Chavez administration and I want to show you a couple
of the..., these were classified files until recently, but these are all airplane trips from Venezuela for drug running operations, these are speed boats.
And I want to finish with the right to self-defense; the Rondos, Los Pepes, if you remember when Pablo Escobar was creating chaos in Latin America, he was
the drug kingpin of the world.
The government was ineffective against him until Los Pepes,a self-defense group, or almost a self-generated group that is not affiliated with the government,
arises in almost all this situations in which it increases the violence.
It causes massive breaches of human rights, but it always happens, it is always a result of the initiated violence of the terrorist groups, but that tends to
be what kills this and what puts an end to it.
I want to conclude with this, this is a public choice theory school, which I love, the best things to combat terrorism is prosperity, and where there's
prosperity, there's not terrorist.
When someone has hope and can find a job, there´s no inducement to become a terrorist or join these groups. And where there is most opportunity and least
corruption, there´s the least terrorism. Thank you very much.
Audience:You skipped political theory; the first term for terrorism was used by Robes Pierre in the French Revolution, and the Prudhomme coined the term
terrorism in The Apology of Terrorism. The only one who can do terrorism according to that theory is the state, and you are confusing issues, other issues.
Secondly, since this is an economic seminar, I would ask a theoretician, a North American theoretician, Noam Chomsky, very famous, very well-known, the
economy of terrorism, how much money does the U.S. make by making arms, who divides the nations with arms? Who generates arms trafficking? Who invents terrorism?
There were atomic bombs in Iraq, and Bin Laden, what does Noam Chomsky say? Is the panacea and it was invented. Another North American theoretician, Wright
Mills, sociologist. He, in The Elite of Power, he says that North American power, U.S. power, is corrupted, politically, militarily, economically.
Unfortunately, not Americans are that way, now I will ask you, if U.S. indigenous people who are in reservations are terrorists, and is that why you don't
let them move around?
John Purdue:Great question, I love that kind of questions. Let me first say that that's an illustration of what we don't need to be doing, you're on the
opposite side obviously, I love you for it, with you I can debate this outside of this as much as you want. Indians, los indigenas, in the United States can do whatever they want.
One of the main problems is that there´s... hay mucha mitología in Latin America about the United States, that's one of them, evidently; I´ve never heard it
before, but it's a new one on me; but there was another one, Mexico, you can still do a poll in Mexico and they will tell you this, we now know who put this out and who reiterated it.
But now, they used to say that rich Americans would steal poor Mexican kids for their body parts and their kidneys and things like that. A huge population of
Mexico believes that.
Indians in the United States can do whatever they want, the reservations were created out of things that happened 150 years ago that we all think was
terrible but there's nothing contemporary about that, Noam Chomsky is a linguist who's bien izquierdista, as you know.
If you pick that side, I could go to the farthest ride and say no he says this... and we´d argue all day, but that wouldn't get us to accomplish
anything.
The only thing I would ask you is, would you be willing in this debate to figure out what can we agree on and not "my guy says this, your guy says this, my
linguist, my economist says this..." we can fight on this stuff all day long and that´s what happens too much.
But if you and I sat down and said, "Okay we agree on this... we´ll get that done", it should be half and half derechista-izquierdista, for example, on these
CVRs and the truth and reconciliation commission, and things like that, we´d get a lot further, because every time you don't do that you create another argument for the other side and you
create a problem, and
the other side says "Okay, you did this..." it's never resolved and that's why a lot of these problems linger for forty years in Latin America and all of the
world is you attack from one side or the other, from both extremes.
You don´t ever figure out, "Okay, we don't agree, we don't see the world the same way and our view is completely opposite of yours".
Perfect, that's fine, we can still get along, be friends, I got lots of friends that are from the other side as well. But what we cannot agree on is what do
we agree on; this, this, and this, let´s get this done.
So, that´s the only way I can answer your question, it would take us five ours and be debating in front of everyone. But still I love that question, I knew
there were people here that would give me that and I want it, so if anybody has similar questions please let me know.
Audience:What you just said is absolutely true, I was born and lived in Argentina, then in Peru,and it is absolutely true.
Now, what happens is that, I'm sorry but, right and left will never be able to reach an agreement, and we can never be in agreement, much less in this type
of topic, because it is something that happened very often in Argentina and Peru, and I'm not saying in Guatemala,I see it in Guatemala and this is a matter of concern and that is that we say
both sides wish to put an end to the past.
No, that is not true for the left; the left doesn't want to put an end to the past, the left doesn't want to find the truth. The left wants to use
politically the interpretation that they do of the past.
And that, compare the cases of Argentina with Chile, the armed forces in Chile were not less violators, they didn't commit fewer sins than the Chilean
commanders said than the Argentinean ones.
However, in Argentina you can see that those same things are resoundingly successful in their psychological destabilization campaign in the moral murder of
the armies and the military.
They arranged things particularly with the control that they have of the universities and the media, they arranged things in order to discredit morally.
Therefore our military is a thief, a murderer, a corrupt, and guilty of genocide, and this was done by the Montoneros, who are now ministers, as you yourself have just pointed out, and that is
a reality.
The Chileans however, in Chile that doesn't happen, it didn't happen. Yes, General Pinochet paid for his things but there was not in one similar to the
campaign of moral murder that we see in Argentina, why? Because you said that towards the end. Prosperity is the anathema against terrorism.
Simply the terrorists, the Chilean military, like the Argentineans, were successful in their economic model, so much so that the consultations administration
followed the same model and have not departed from it, while none of that happened in Argentina and that is why the military are being trampled by public opinion as is the case in
Argentina.
I believe that of those cases, that at universities, and here in Guatemala particularly, we should all draw the right lessons. Thank you very much.
Audience:I think that the matter of terrorism and human rights will depend always on the side you are. You can't try to be in the middle point, it´s
impossible, you know, the left is guerrillas or the genocides of the right.
It´s very difficult to be balanced, but I cannot agree in the fact that the left has the truth. All the right, here in Guatemala has the media, all. We are
here, at the University Francisco Marroquín, defends what happened in the war in the internal conflict, but the other side of the story is right; not all the leaders of the guerrilla were
saints, they committed crimes, massacres, but it's very difficult to agree on that.
So it will always be a matter of debate, it is this or that, that's all.
John Purdue:I've always thought that it would be wonderful if you could, besides prosperity, if you can maximize choice, to where, if you want to go into
some section of Guatemala, or me into some section of the United States, and one side gets to govern Montana exactly like they want to, and if you want to go to Montana you´re free to go and
free to leave, I think that would be wonderful, we'd probably be a lot happier.
But what we try to do throughout history is, the history of mankind is one side you basically fall into the Rousseau model, philosophically, or the Locke
model, one way or the other, it seems that way.
Throughout history, we have a history of one side trying to impose their philosophy on the other, this depends on what time you're talking about, as which
side is more powerful and imposing and vice versa, but until we can get to that point, where we can choose where we live and what the governing rules are there, we have to learn to get
along.
And like you said, you know, my point here is not to say, ok we can all come together and sing Kum bah yah on this, my point is to say, we´re not going to
agree.
I see the world, I see a fact, a situation, a news report, and you see it 100%, 180 degrees different than I do. We interpret it completely different, I've
come to understand that about politics, it's inevitable, you can't help it, is the way we see the world.
But, what we can do is, I think I can convince, I´m trying to convince you today of nothing more than, if one side or the other. And I'm not here promoting
my side should be three-fourths of the CVR or anything like that.
I'm saying, I don't think my side should do it, I don't think your side should do it, we need to find, given the fact that we don't see the world the same,
we don't believe in the same methods of governing each other, what can we come together on to get these things resolved? Because we have to resolve them or else they will go on
perpetually.
Audience:From right and from left that has been done terrorism, I can name the Soviet Union making terrorist acts against those who were not with them, I can
name also governments like the Guatemalan case, that when people weren't agreeing with them, made terrorist acts against them.
So for you, what´s the middle point for all this controversy, about human rights and the justification of the using of terrorism, what would be the middle
point?
John Purdue:There's no middle point first of all, we have to figure out the best way how to handle the situation. Let me say, first of all, the right in
Latin America, especially, and the rest of the world has done a terrible job also, when they come to power, giving an example, Nicaragua.
The right comes to power and I like to think that in most places attending of their philosophy is anticorruption and not doing the things, not making
government a vehicle for a largess, a vehicle for giving, for taking money from this group and give it to this group.
But when we get in power in a lot of places, they start doing the same thing, politics corrupt, if there's an anticorruption method that work, we tend to
pacify things like this, that come up when you have one side steeling from the other, you won't go down the street and steal from your neighbor, but you might let someone do it for you and give
you the money, so that's been a problem for politics forever.
The other thing is in these military issues, I´ve tried to help some of these groups that are setting up ways for...which the military will trap..., if it´s
a military group I know guys that come to the United States to go to, and I'm not military, I'm a civilian, but and I know guys that come to Fort Benning;
I'm from Georgia, I grew up 45 minutes from Fort Benning where the infantry trains, and they bring them over to teach them about how not to commit human
rights violations. A policy of most militaries that I know in the modern age that, to try to avoid and minimize human right violations or things like that, now it happens any time you have a
conflict, anywhere in the world that´s going to happen.
But if one side's policy is to minimize and the other side´s policy is to seek opportunities to attack innocent civilians, to create popularity or publicity
for themselves, to me that's a huge difference and we need to work on how do you get the other side not to do that.
And the only way we´ve been able to do it so far is by using a hammer, when all you got is a hammer everything looks like a nail, so when you have terrorists
you send the army after them.
At least now we started training the military a lot more in counterinsurgency and more than that, that´s been training for a long time, but that tendeded to
be in the past hardcore military tactics, that is now becoming more of a winning hearts and minds of the local population because the one thing, the Rand corporation did a study on this, what
ends terrorist groups?
And one of the main things they found was that if they did not have the support of the local population, that's the most important factor, or one of the most
important factors for their longevity, so if they can't attract the popularity or the support of the local population, then they don't exist anymore.
So one of the improvements to the military training has been winning hearts and minds, and I think that's a good improvement, other than that, we keep
working on it
Slides
Content
Initial credits
Introduction
What is terrorism?
Definition from Secretary of State Colin Powell
Terrorist incidents worldwide
Concepts that define terrorism
Recruiting or allowing children to serve in combat
Deliberately targeting children as a method of maximizing terror
Planting bombs with intent to kill innocent civilians
Kidnapping for ransom as a means of funding
Who initiated the violence?
Purpose of an army
Popularity of terrorist ideologies
Human rights as a political tool
Judicial warfare
Cites Brady Tyson
Human rights as a weapon
Cites Richard Holbrooke
Truth and reconciliation commissions
Cites Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Latin American terrorist cases
Argentina
Montoneros
Cites Victoria Villarual, president of CELTYV
La otra parte de la verdad, Nicolás Márquez
Ex Montonero Martín Gras
Perú
Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path)
MRTA
Operation Chavín de Huántar
Later allegations
Eligia Rodríguez Bustamante, deputy director of APRODEH
Letter from APRODEH to the European Parliament
Peruvian government statement on human rights accusations
Leahy law
False accusations
Valentín Paniagua's and Alejandro Toledo's administrations
Case of General Eduardo Bellido
Colombia
Publication of "The Authoritarian Spell"
Disagreement on statistics
US Embassy report
Guatemala
Direct responsibility of the State
Selective indignation
Talk of the Devil, Riccardo Orizio
Middle East and Latin America
Long term collaboration
Cuba
Venezuela and Iran
Nicaragua and Iran
Narco-terrorism
Air and maritime drug operations
Right to self-defense
Conclusion
Prosperity
Questions, answers and comments period
Terrorism in the political theory
How much money does the United States make from manufacturing and trafficking arms? Who invents terrorism? Are Native Americans
terrorists?
The right and the left will never be able to reach an agreement
Comparison between Argentina and Chile
Your view of terrorism and human rights depends on whether you support the left or right
Maximization of choice
What is the middle point between the human rights controversy and the justification of terrorism?
Corruption problem
Anti-corruption methods
Educating military groups
Counterinsurgency
Final credits
Todos los comentarios
Selección del Editor
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Universidad Francisco Marroquín
6 Calle final, zona 10
Edificio de la Escuela de Negocios
Oficina EN-103
Guatemala, Guatemala 01010
Teléfono (+502) 2338-7700 ext. 7849
Transcript
Slides
