Overview

For more than fifty years, the United States supported the Colombian military in a war that cost over 200,000 lives. During a single period of heightened U.S. assistance known as Plan Colombia, the Colombian military killed more than 5,000 civilians. In Plan Colombia John Lindsay-Poland narrates a 2005 massacre in the San Jose de Apartado Peace Community and the subsequent investigation, official cover-up, and response from the international community. He examines how the multibillion-dollar U.S. military aid and official indifference contributed to the Colombian military's atrocities. Drawing on his human rights activism and interviews with military officers, community members, and human rights defenders, Lindsay-Poland describes grassroots initiatives in Colombia and the United States that resisted militarized policy and created alternatives to war. Although they had few resources, these initiatives offered models for constructing just and peaceful relationships between the United States and other nations. Yet, despite the civilian death toll and documented atrocities, Washington, DC, considered Plan Colombia's counterinsurgency campaign to be so successful that it became the dominant blueprint for U.S. military intervention around the world.

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9781478001188

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Reviews

Most studies of human rights violations approach cases at the national level and offer little insight into how U.S. military aid is territorialized. . . . By tracking the career trajectories of Colombian officers, Lindsay-Poland directs our attention to a shared war, and to a common counterinsurgent expertise, developed between the United States and Colombia over the course of 50 years. -- Emma Shaw Crane * NACLA *

Author Information

John Lindsay-Poland is Healing Justice Associate at the American Friends Service Committee and author of Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama, also published by Duke University Press.

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