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 José de Apartadó 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.

List of Abbreviations  ix
Acknowledgments  xiii
Prologue  1
Introduction: Challenging American Exceptionalism  7
1. The Longest War: U.S. Military Influence in Colombia, 1952-1995  26
2. War on the Frontier  38
3. How Plan Colombia Was Sold  51
4. "We Want a Witness": Accompaniment in San José de Apartadó 64
5. Mapping Our War: Where Did U.S. Aid in Colombia Go?  83
6. Killing the Future  101
7. Projects of Life  123
8. Massacre Aftermath and Cover-Up  140
9. Widespread and Systematic: The Dynamics of "Legalized" Murder  151
10. The United States Effect: Impacts on "False Positive" Killings  164
11. Investigation of the Massacre  183
12. An Encounter with Power  198
13. Judicial Warfare  210
14. U.S. Policy Lessons  220
Conclusion: The Arc of Impunity  226
Notes 233
Bibliography  273
Index  281

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.