Polarization of the Human Rights Case

The effort, often successful, to discredit the armed forces of the State, put into practice
by revolutionary organizations, aims to group together in a repetitive way of abusing
human rights. They are well aware that these accusatory voices find an immediate echo
in non-governmental organizations.

The resulting polarization only hurts the cause of human rights. The insurgency seeks to
provoke the official forces, and takes any incident to form an official cause of
barbarism. The strategy in such cases follows the following general guidelines:

- Campaigns against military and police organizations, carried out through

disinformation that ends up persuading public opinion and international organizations.

- Giving global scope to manifest cases of occasional rape.

- If there really is government disrespect for human rights, or at least tolerance for the
abuses committed by the public force, this provokes a far-reaching campaign in search
of international disqualification.

- Once the bad reputation of a State has been created, and thus the abuses are corrected
or at least reduced to a minimum.

The objective of this offensive strategy is to cause as much damage as possible to the
State and to discredit its armed forces because they organize a fence for the
revolutionary advance.

This set of circumstances comes to gravitate seriously on the spirit of the armed
organizations, especially due to the unilateral approach that international entities carry
out regarding the issue. Any good will approximation that is made from outside the
affected country is received as it is considered in advance vitiated by hostile bias.

Polarization gives rise to two irreconcilable attitudes, equally adverse to the cause of
human rights:

Subversion is based on the assumption that all resources are valid in the insurrectionary
struggle, if they contribute to victory through what in revolutionary terminology is
called a combination of all forms of struggle. The government forces respond to them in
a way that is as unethical as this, but more reprehensible because it comes from the
State that should not accept the terms of that type of contest,
This polarization translates into a progressive worsening of the abuse. The escalation of
reprisals on both sides is aggravated. The cause of human rights succumbs to the
savagery of the contest.

It is here that a true statesman and a true military commander must put an end to official
folly. It does not matter that the biased accusations or the convictions of ill-informed
entities or the violations of human rights by the contenders in the insurgency continue.
The duty of the civil authority is to guarantee respect for those inalienable rights,
particularly by members of the armed forces.

Counterinsurgency Strategy

When the nature of the revolutionary attack makes the use of force unavoidable, it is
important to design a policy and plan a military strategy to deal with it successfully.

Ideological movements, even if ideology is a mask to hide other purposes, strengthen

their chances of success in the error of the government and its armed forces in dealing
with the problem. It often happens that when facing nascent guerrillas, they only notice
the challenge of weapons and fail to decipher what is hidden. In this way, the tendency
is to face the challenge as if the guerrilla were a cause and not a consequence.

The simplistic idea that an act of force must be responded to with another superior
force.

The guerrillas could not exist if there were not a breeding ground of a socioeconomic
nature, combined with political, religious or ethnic ones. Therefore, the simplistic
solution of force reduces the overall capacity of the State to resolve a situation in which
the military effort is only part, and not the most important, of the treatment to be
applied.

Within this comprehensive strategy, due attention to human rights plays a preponderant
role. That flag cannot be handed over to subversion, creating actions that can be used to
denounce the regime for violations that end up being accepted without benefit of
inventory, undermining the cause of legitimacy.