The Colombia Page |
P.S. If you don't recognize the green area superimposed upon the map of Colombia, it is Vietnam, all of it. We fought a losing war with over 500,000 troops in the southern part of Vietnam and lost over 40,000 American soldiers. The Vietnamese lost over 3 million people. Colombia is more that three times as large as all of Vietnam. |
From DRCNet
6/25/2000
The US Senate voted Wednesday for a massive escalation in US military intervention in Colombia. Senators voted overwhelmingly for the package after turning back two amendments supported by Latin American, human rights and drug policy reform groups, including DRCNet.The Wellstone amendment, which would have diverted $225 million from the Colombian military to domestic treatment programs, lost 89-11.
The Gorton amendment, which would have cut the assistance down to $200 million, was defeated 79-19.
While some differences with the House version of the bill remain, massive US involvement in Colombia is now virtually a done deal.
The vote results sparked harsh criticism from some senators, as well as from human rights and drug policy organizations.
Senator Slade Gorton (R-WA) told his colleagues, "The capacity of this body for self-delusion seems to this senator to be unlimited. Mark my words, we are on the verge... of involvement in a civil war in Latin America, without the slightest promise that our intervention will be a success... This is a down payment, and a down payment only. Next year we are likely to hear we need more money and more men."
Winifred Tate of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) told DRCNet, "We are deeply disappointed in the superficial debate, the failure to seriously reevaluate failed counternarcotics policies and the failure to develop new strategies for combating drug abuse at home and realistically dealing with Colombia's problems."
Sanho Tree, Drug Policy Director at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) told DRCNet, "In Colombia, the roots of conflict are social, political and economic. Guns and helicopters won't remedy the problems of poverty in the Andes or addiction in America."
"The region needs a mini-Marshall Plan, and we're sending them Desert Storm," added Tree.
And the storm should arrive soon. WOLA's Tate said training and hardware shipment will get underway quickly once the bill gets out of conference committee and is signed by President Clinton. The bill should go to conference committee next week, she said.
Both Tree and Tate still see opportunities for making marginal improvements in a bad bill in conference committee. According to Tate, the Senate version contains stronger language conditioning aid on human rights accountability and contains less money for the Colombian military than the House version.
The House version contains some funding to assist the 1.5 million Colombians already internally displaced by the decades-long civil war, noted Tree. But, he added, "The bill contains money for future displacements. We are now planning to displace additional people, as if 1.5 million people isn't enough."
While the immediate battle has been lost, advocates of an enlightened policy toward Colombia are not giving up. "Our emphasis will be to continue to educate people about the impact in Colombia," said Tate. "We are committed to continuing to monitor the situation on the ground there."
And, Tate added, "This is just the first step. They'll be coming back for more money soon. There will be many battles down the road, and each one will be an opportunity to renew our questions, our concerns, our activism."
In the meantime, both Tate and Tree concur that concerned citizens should contact their senators and let them know how disappointed they are. "We are particularly disturbed about the failure of some people who usually champion concerns about civil society to oppose this bill," said Tate. She nominated Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Joe Biden (D-DE) for particular opprobrium. "Biden returned from Colombia only to misrepresent the concerns of the Colombian human rights community," she said, "and Durbin reneged on the Wellstone amendment."
Tree, meanwhile, fingered the entire Connecticut delegation. "Chris Dodd (D-CT) was the biggest whore in the Senate on this," he said, "but the entire Connecticut delegation, usually very good on Latin America and human rights, all marched in lockstep." The reason, says Tree, is that they were in the pocket of United Technologies, parent company of Sikorsky, a helicopter manufacturer. Dodd offered a failed amendment to switch from cheaper Huey helicopters to Sikorsky's Black Hawks.
"All of them [the Connecticut delegation] supported giving military aid to the worst human rights abuser in the hemisphere, to their everlasting shame," said Tree.
The following Senators voted in favor of Paul Wellstone's amendment shifting $225 million in military aid funding to domestic drug treatment: Boxer (D-CA, co-sponsor), Byrd (D-WV), Dorgan (D-ND), Feingold (D-WI), Grams (R-MN), Harkin (D-IA), Leahy (D-VT), Mikulski (D-MD), Murray (D-WA), Specter (R-PA), Wellstone (D-MN).
The following Senators voted in favor of Slade Gorton's amendment slashing the Colombia package from nearly one billion down to $200 million in order to pay down the national debt: Allard (R- CO), Boxer (D-CA), Collins (R-ME), Craig (R-ID), Crapo (R-ID), Enzi (R-WY), Fitzgerald (R-IL), Gorton (R-WA), Gramm (R-TX), Grams (R-MN), Gregg (R-NH), Harkin (D-IA), Hutchinson (R- AR), Kohl (D-WI), Leahy (D-VT), Mikulski (D-MD), Murray (D-WA), Specter (R-PA), Thomas (R-WY).
If you are represented by any of the senators listed above, please thank them for taking the right stand on this issue. Visit http://www.senate.gov to find their contact information, or call (202) 224-3121. If either or both of your senators is not on one of these lists, call them and voice your criticism of their disregard for human rights and common sense.
From DRCNet
1/15/2000
As stories of a broken cease-fire between government and rebel forces filtered out of Bogota this week, U.S. newspapers reported that the Clinton Administration is moving ahead with plans for a $1.2 billion "anti-drug" military aid package to Colombia. The amount is a fourfold increase from what the country received last year, when it was the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid behind Egypt and Israel.The aid package has been championed for months by retired General Barry McCaffrey, former chief of U.S. military operations in Latin America but now better known as Clinton's "Drug Czar." McCaffrey has argued that the extensive military aid in the form of weaponry, equipment and both combat and intelligence training is necessary to fight the drug war in that country. But will the plan only hasten the U.S. descent into a Vietnam War-style military quagmire in Colombia?
Although the Pentagon has reportedly insisted that it can make sure U.S. aid is used only on the drug war front, it has lobbied to ensure that the aid goes only to the Colombian military, and not to civilian police agencies. This is in line with McCaffrey's contention that the vast increases in coca production in Colombia in recent years have occurred mainly in areas held by rebel forces of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) Ð a fact disputed by U.N. officials assigned to oversee coca eradication in FARC-held territories Ð but raises concerns among human rights advocates who cite a long record of abuses by the military.
Sanho Tree, director of the Washington based Institute for Policy Studies' Drug Policy Project, was not convinced by reassurances from Pentagon and Clinton Administration officials that U.S. oversight will prevent further human rights abuses in Colombia. "They say they're going to monitor the human rights situation and purge violators from the army," Tree told The Week Online. "But there are no jobs, so when these people leave the army, they join the paramilitaries," where abuses continue unchecked.
Moreover, Tree explained, the interdiction and eradication programs which the aid package is supposed to fund are widely acknowledged to be the least effective strategies for reducing illicit drug use in the United States. According to a 1999 report from the Government Accounting Office, more than one half billion U.S. dollars spent on interdiction and eradication of Colombian coca products in the past decade, including record seizures and lab destructions in 1998, had no impact on the availability of Colombian cocaine in the U.S. Nor are such strategies cost effective Ð a 1994 study by the RAND Corporation found that providing treatment to cocaine users in the U.S. is 10 times more effective than interdiction, and 23 times more effective than eradication.
Given that eradication and interdiction are largely ineffective, and the likelihood that the U.S. is being drawn deeper into Colombia's civil war, why would the U.S. consider a massive increase in funding for just these policies? Tree said that SOUTHCOM, the U.S. military's Latin American operation and McCaffrey's former command post, depends mightily upon the drug war for its subsistence. "Without the drug war, SOUTHCOM would be a coast guard," Tree said. "It's one of the few areas in the military that really wants to fight the drug war. It's their bread and butter."
Tree said it's unlikely the proposed aid package will encounter much resistance in Congress, and compared it to the passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964, which sealed the U.S. entrance into the Vietnam War. "Back then, all the Congressmen were afraid of looking soft on Communism. Now they're afraid of looking soft on drugs. Most know it's a failed policy, but they're afraid to take a stand."
What will it take to impel them to take a stand?
"Body bags, filled with U.S. soldiers," Tree said.
The Institute for Policy Studies is on the web at http://www.ips-dc.org.
Read more about the militarization of the drug war in Latin America at the Lindesmith Center web site: http://www.lindesmith.org/library/international_index2.html
From the Drug Reform Coordination Network newsletter (10/29/99) Republished by permission.
A looming military aid package that would dramatically increase direct U.S. assistance to Colombia's armed forces, has become more controversial in the wake of a massive peace demonstration last Monday involving more than ten million Colombians throughout the violence-torn nation. The peace campaign, known as "No Mas!" ("No More"), mobilized two million Colombians in the capital city of Bogota alone, and called on negotiators from the government and the FARC guerrillas to enact a swift resolution to the decades-long civil conflict.
US drug warriors, including Republicans like Dan Burton, Ben Gilman and Bob Barr, and administration officials like drug czar Barry McCaffrey, a former Army General who commanded the SOUTHCOM division that operates in Latin America, have called for dramatic, multi-billion dollar aid increases in counternarcotics aid, much of it directly to the Colombian military, arguing that the illicit drug trade is financing the FARC guerrilla forces.
At a conference in Washington on October 15, however, sponsored by the US/Colombia Coordinating Office and the Colombia Human Rights Committee, peace activists, legislators and human rights advocates denounced the aid proposal.
Carlos Salinas, Advocacy Director for Latin America at Amnesty International USA, warned "This escalation of aid... could well be the final gush of gasoline into the Colombian conflagration to create one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of this hemisphere."
Salinas also pointed out that the left-wing "narco- guerrillas" of which U.S. drug warriors warn have counterparts in the form of right-wing "narco- paramilitaries" with close ties to the armed forces. Yet, entire Congressional drug hearings are often held without the word "paramilitaries" even being spoken. Salinas explained that doing so "would mean the collapse of credibility in proposing aid to the Army," and said the "paramilitaries are responsible for the overwhelming number of civilian deaths, sometimes as in the cases of a few weeks ago in Valle del Cauca, with machetes and chainsaws," and that when you talk about the paramilitaries, "then you talk about the Colombian Army."
Peace activists at the conference uniformly opposed the aid package. Agustin Jimenez, President of the Committee in Solidarity with Political Prisoners (CSPP), noted that after 40 years of civil war, ten persons are killed daily on average, 70% civilians uninvolved in the conflict. Jesus Antonio Gonzalez, Director of the Human Rights Division of the Central Union of Workers, said that 3,000 labor leaders >from his organization have been killed in the past 13 years, with the killers escaping justice 99.9 percent of the time.
Senator Piedad Cordoba Ruiz, the highest-ranking Afro- Colombian congressperson, attended after having recently been released by kidnappers. Cordoba said she was moved around the MedellÁn area for several days, with the cooperation and involvement of the armed forces. Cordoba explained that armed combatants often forget that civilians have rights, and bomb non-combatants under the pretext of counterinsurgency, and said the drug issue should not be falsely imposed on the peace process.
Chomsky's introduction to Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy, a 125-page book by Javier Giraldo S.J., written in 1996. It appears in Znet.
11/2/99
An article by Matthew Knoester detailing the role of the U.S. in the current troubles. Colombia is not a democracy; a small elite rules with a brutal and indiscriminate hand. U.S. military aid has gone, for the most part, not to eradicate cocaine, but to bolster the military and its paramilitary assassins who represent the interests of the large landowners. An eye-opener. The article from the Colombia Support Network.
10/24/99
The Clinton administration is seeking one billion dollars in aid for Columbia to fight guerrillas and to ostensibly quell the hugh narcotics business. The type of war the administrations proposed to wage is the same bloody and inhumane war that the Carter and Reagan administrations fought through their proxies in El Salvador. The fact of the matter is that drugs have virtually nothing to do with the coming war. Read the complete article posted on the Colombia Support Network.
9/29/99
A detailed report on the political and military situation in Colombia from a human rights standpoint.
8/14/99
Colombia is covered with jungle and mountains. There are two guerilla armies, one of which has been fighting the government for over 20 years. Paramilitary groups believed to be associated with the Colombian Army murder dissenters and peasants with a vigor approaching that of the El Salvadorian death squads of the early 1980s. Our country is being drawn into the fighting on the basis of eradicating the drug trade. Colombia is now the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid.A billion dollars is not small change. It represents a serious commitment to the present regime. If the Colombian government collapses, and it certainly could with its long history of oppression and corruption, are our leaders planning to send in our troops? Why should we prop up a government that represents a small, wealthy clique that has run the country to suit its own purposes, ignoring the vast majority of peasants, many of them Native Americans? Now is the time to ask hard questions, for stragetic decisions are already being made in secret, and the infernal logic of "credibility" is slowly but surely working its evil course, just as it did in the Balkans. How many Serbs and Kosovars, as well as American soldiers and Vietnamese were sacrificed upon the blood-stained altar of credibility?
Read the Stratfor news and analysis on Colombia. (7/03/2001 You can't read this material unless you are a "member." They want you to pay for this information now.
The Colombia Support Network web site. News you won't see in the local newspapers or TV on what's going on in Colombia.
News Agency New Colombia. Another alternative news source. (8/3/2001 It appears that this site hasn't been updated in a long time. --Ed)
Office of the Americas, an organization for justice and peace in the Americas. This is a good source of information on Colombia and other Central and South American issues.
8/18/99
Colombia: The U.S. Military is in Danger of Going to War on the Wrong Side . "After Kosovo why not next Colombia, land of the drug barons and 40 years of near continuous civil war? The rest of the world may drop its jaw at the idea of NATO troops being sent to pacify leftist guerrilla groups, army-backed, fascist-inclined paramilitaries and the world's most ruthless drug cartels. But in Bogota, Colombia's capital, it is being touted by some as a necessary solution. And if not NATO, at least the U.S. army." An analysis and warning by Jonathan Power, reporter, columnist, film-maker and writer.8/19/99
Inter Press Service: Paramilitaries Massacre Supposed Rebel Allies The paramilitaries have historically been associated with both the Colombian Army and the large landowners.8/23/99
U.S. Ready to Boost Aid to Colombia. From the Washington Post. You read it here last week, but it's now official, since it's in the WP. (Link no longer valid. Sorry.)9/10/99
Colombian right-wing paramilitary leader Ramon Isaza said he will intensify the campaign against leftist rebels. From Agence France Presse.