Plan Colombia: Cashing-In on the Drug War Failure

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Plan Colombia: Cashing-In on the Drug War Failure
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Plan Colombia: Cashing-In on the Drug War Failure
Allegedly intended to fight the production of coca and cocaine in Colombia, the $2 billion-U.S. "Plan Colombia" assistance package (currently renamed "Andean Initiative") has 80% of its aid going to the Colombian police and military for weapons, training and helicopters. While this policy meant huge contracts for U.S. defense contractors paid for by U.S. tax-payers, it translated into abruptly stopping a peace and dialogue process between then Colombian President Andres Pastrana and the leftist rebel groups, stepping up the war in the country's 50-year civil struggle. Recently elected Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has actually intensified the fighting against the two main rebel groups, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the ELN (Army of National Liberation) with newly delivered U.S. weapons and helicopters.

Colombia is now sinking into a hellish spiral of violence with more bombings and kidnappings, more disappearances and murders of opposition figures and union leaders and intensified warfare by the Colombian military. Plan Colombia is helping to combat the leftist guerilla-movements, not the narco-traffickers.

While the U.S. Congress had demanded that U.S. military assistance be used only to fight drug-trafficking and not to meddle in the Colombian civil war, the U.S. State Department has found a way to sidestep this issue by officially announcing a shift in priority from fighting drugs to fighting so-called "terrorism". This makes it easier to target the actions of irregular armed groups in Colombia with a focus on leftist groups controlling territories rich in natural resources, oil in particular.

Colombia is rapidly becoming one of the main oil suppliers to the U.S., following closely neighboring Venezuela that produces over 1.5 million barrels of oil a day. Now Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez is viewed as a black sheep by the current U.S. administration for his leftist policies and sympathy for other leftist world leaders including Cuba's leader Fidel Castro. Colombia for its part is governed by a few extremely wealthy families with historical ties to the U.S. power elite. But their grip over Colombia is being increasingly challenged by leftist guerillas that already control most of the countryside.

Located primarily in the North-East and South of the country, Colombia's oil resources are all the more attractive that they are close to the U.S. while most other known oil reserves in the world are now starting to dwindle. But international oil companies including Los Angeles, CA-based Occidental Petroleum, that are currently prospecting and exploiting these resources are faced with a major problem: most of these resources are located in areas controlled by leftist guerrilla movements, primarily the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the ELN (Army of National Liberation) that are "taxing" their operations for their own funding.

Coincidently or not, the focus of the U.S. military assistance under "Plan Colombia" is precisely in these oil-rich countryside areas where the Colombian military and paramilitary forces are having a hard time fighting the guerrilla. In February of 2002 though, the U.S. State Department officially announced shifting its priority in Colombia from anti-drug to anti-guerrilla policy. At the same time, President Bush pushed a request through Congress for a total of $100 Million earmarked to train a new Colombian military unit for the specific mission of protecting the drilling and piping operations of the U.S. Occidental Petroleum corporation in Colombia. The ambiguity of the initial "Plan Colombia" of U.S. President Clinton seems to have dissipated with the now openly pro-oil, anti guerrilla stand of the current U.S. administration that comes entirely from the oil industry.

The FARC and the ELN are Colombia's foremost armed leftist rebel groups today. The official position of the FARC is that a strong leftist opposition movement cannot possibly enter the political arena in Colombia without risking its members being murdered and massacred like what had happened to the leftist "Patriotic Union" in the 1980s. With 20 to 30,000 armed guerillas and an unknown number of civilian supporters and sympathizers, FARC controls the larger half of Colombia's countryside, organizing 70 separate fronts each responsible for their own funding. Deprived of any foreign assistance, the movement now relies on three main sources of funding:

1) "Taxing" economic activities in the territories they control

2) Kidnaping thousands for ransom and exchange for prisoners with the Colombian government

3) Coca and cocaine-trafficking even though FARC officials claim the movement only taxes traffickers who come and buy coca-paste from the farmers.

Involved in a peace-process with the Colombian government until February 2002 when President Andres Pastrana abruptly invaded the peace-zone he had given them, the extremely well-armed and equipped FARC have now intensified their war against the Colombian armed forces despite the U.S. military assistance. Both sides of the conflict agree that there is no end in sight as the FARC are not strong enough to capture major cities and neither the Colombian military nor the irregular paramilitary groups are strong enough to regain the countryside controlled by the guerrillas.

Growing coca-leaves has been a medicinal tradition throughout the Andes for well over 1,000 years. The "matte de coca" for instance is a tea made from dried coca leaves that indeed cures ailments and increases strength and spirit. Cocaine, however, is a highly chemical and toxic by-product of the coca leaves that has nothing to do with Andean traditions but rather with the sociological and psychological imbalance of today's modern urban societies. Production of coca and cocaine has exploded from the 1980s, fueled by a seemingly ever-increasing demand from the United States in particular. A growing movement throughout Latin America calls for the legalization of the production of coca leaves with some going as far as calling for the legalization of illicit drugs in order to fight organized crime and money-laundering.

While fortunes are being made by traffickers and corrupt international financial institutions, poor farmers in the Andes, in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, have been cornered into growing the only produce that still brings cash on their farm. Coca leaves and coca-paste, a mixture of coca leaves macerated in kerosene, are the only products that buyers will come and pay cash for in areas where there is virtually no presence of the state and no social assistance whatsoever. The international agrobusiness competition, American for the most part, has destroyed their ability to sell other agricultural produce even in their own markets.

The U.S. "Plan Colombia" offers a one-time payment of less than $1,000 as assistance to farming families and does nothing to help the local agriculture compete against the much cheaper imports from the United States. Already caught between the warring factions, the poor farmers of Colombia are being further victimized by the U.S. policy of spraying defoliant on their lands with unknown consequences to their health.

While it has been proven that spraying defoliant on coca fields has no other impact than actually stimulating production in wider areas, the dangerous pesticides involved (a beefed-up version of the commercially available "Round-Up" by the Monsanto Corporation) destroys legal crops, poisons the water supply, contaminates local populations and affects the fragile Amazonian eco-system in ways that we are only beginning to understand. These fumigations are conducted in Colombia by the U.S. defense contractor "Dyncorp", a supposedly private corporation that answers to the U.S. government just as any regular army branch but without any oversight by the U.S. Congress. Even though this policy has proven useless and even counter-productive, it still provides a substantial income to Monsanto and to Dyncorp, a corporation with many ties to the U.S. military and power establishment. The official position of the U.S. State Department is that defoliation is safe, however, this same position was also taken by the Pentagon when Agent Orange was being spread in Vietnam. In 1991, the U.S. military eventually acknowledged the toxicity of agent orange and started compensating U.S. Vietnam veterans (though not the local populations) that had been exposed to the spraying. Independent studies have already pinpointed the long-term health and environmental impacts of the chemicals being sprayed in Colombia.

A country of mountains, Colombia like the other Andean countries where similar U.S. spray-programs have been implemented, constitutes the highland of the Amazon basin, a zone that includes parts of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil. This forest, representing one of the lungs of planet Earth (the other lung being Siberia, an area also undergoing raging destruction), is one of the richest and most diverse ecosystems in the world, a delicate and fragile system despite its apparent imposing strength. Just like the mere fact of building a highway cutting through this environment affects life in ways unforeseen, spraying chemicals meant to destroy the foliage will also have consequences that are not too difficult to imagine and will upset the entire cycle of life around the giant trees of the Amazon. Just like anywhere else in the world but on an even greater magnitude, attacking the trees means attacking the soils, attacking the insects, attacking the birds and attacking all the other life-forms that live off them. We know how these processes start, but we can only imagine how they will end. Many world governments have little if any consideration for the environment -- such destructions are still catching up on us all -- and a heavy price will be paid for failed ideas such as spraying defoliant over coca fields in Colombia.

-plancolombia.org/

Plan Colombia: Cashing-In on the Drug War Failure is now available for $25 plus $7 s/h or $12.99 on amazon.com with free shipping. - JOSE , posted 06/05/07

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