This is mostly a placeholder.
A blog by the name of Organic Warfare has two recent entries on contemporary piracy and insurgency: Piracy in the Malacca Straits and Piracy and the Global Insurgency.
"Organic Warfare" states that "modern pirates are now using tactics similar to terrorism to capture ships and goods." By contrast, of course, I'd suggest that the relation is inverse: it is the terrorists who are the inheritors of piracy's historic tradition. Which does not preclude feedback and cross-contamination between the two forms of activity.
UPDATE: John Robb of Global Guerrillas (I'm not sure what the relation is between his two blogs) points to an article in the Sunday Herald on private navies, also in the Malacca Straits.
But as I point out in my comment on Robb's entry, the irony is that "private navies" are far from being "a radical new solution." After all, "privateers" were, precisely, private military forces that flourished before the nationalization of naval warfare. So from privateers to pirates, and back to privateers...
3 comments:
No probs with the self-promotion. :) But I've just left comments on your Salvador posts: I agree with the broad brushstrokes of what you're saying, but with very few of the details. I'm afraid I concentrated on the disagreements rather than with my agreements (that happens), but in the spirit that I also think that it's worth pursuing the links or similarities between the so-called war on terror and other insurgencies, such as the Salvadoran case.
On juntas... I don't know exactly what your point is, unless you simply want to suggest that ARENA were a nasty bunch, which is true enough but it seems unhelpful to be imprecise about what's meant by "junta" especially in that at one point (between 79 and 82) a junta did indeed govern Salvador.
ARENA didn't come to power until 1989. (Yes, it had been founded by the time of El Mozote, but only three months earlier.) Of course, D'Aubisson exerted tremendous power long before Christiani's accession to the presidency, but it's simplistic to blame everything on ARENA, or indeed on US backing.
ARENA didn't come to power until 1989 precisely because the US were trying (and failing) to shore up the Christian Democrats. And yes, at the same time, training up the Atlacatl etc., not least in the "School of the Americas," but that's a separate issue.
And the US didn't form, arm, and fund the Atlacatl, except indirectly; it trained its officers, notably Monterrosa, and probably advised them in the field, but again some precision is worthwhile here.
The Atlacatl was a batallion within the Salvadoran army, not the armed wing of ARENA, as you seem to be suggesting. Nor was the Atlacatl a death squad, although undoubtedly it supplied the personnel for death squads. Hence the relationship between the Salvadoran army (and batallions such as the Atlacatl) and death squads is more complicated than you're suggesting, too. The El Mozote massacre, for instance, wasn't the work of a death squad.
Meanwhile, I don't know where you're getting your figures. 75,000 is the standard estimate for the number of victims of the war between 1980 and 1991. I've certainly never seen an "official figure" of 100,000. I'd be pleased to have references that suggest otherwise.
But anyhow, yes, on the larger point that there is a fluid boundary between criminal violence and politically-motivated violence, I agree. I just think your errors of detail detract from this point.
El Mozote wasn't the work of masked gunmen. It was the work of uniformed soldiers. See Mark Danner's report of Rufina Amaya's account. It is more comparable to My Lai than to a death squad operation. But you may have a different definition of "death squad" than I do.
I stand by what I've been saying. The only point where I was unsure was when I said parenthetically that I wasn't sure that ARENA had even been founded by the time of El Mozote. (I later checked and you were right that it had been, three months before.)
I'm not trying to "misconstrue the situation into a more favorable light." (To whom, anyhow?) Merely trying to be more precise. Yes of course the US poured money into counter-insurgency operations in El Salvador. I'm not trying to get the US off the hook. (Or the Salvadoran military, for that matter.)
But yes, we agree on the broad picture.
Anyhow, enough for the time being, except to ask you whether you have a reference for the figure that US advisors "provided advisers and field support personnel integrated with Atlacatl to an amount approximately 10% of the Atlacatl officer corps"? I've not read such a precise assessment anywhere that I can remember, but would be interested if you had a source.
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