In the United States we do not hear much about it, but the war in Colombia keeps raging. That war is fueled by US money, US soldiers, and by US military training.
In early February Ann Tiffany and I [both DGH advisory council members] led an 11-member, 11-day Witness for Peace/SOA Watch delegation to Colombia. We wanted to see the footprint of US policy on this lovely, but war-torn land. And to return home and help make US-Colombia policy more humane.
Most of our delegation have been active protesting the US Army's "anti-insurgency" training at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. (The notorious SOA, donning camouflage, now calls itself the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, WHINSEC.)
Colombia is the SOA's best customer. Of all the Latin American countries, Colombia has had the most soldiers trained there (well over 10,000). Colombia is also the Latin American country whose military has had the worst human rights record- earned in over four decades of civil war. Nowadays the Colombian military outsources much of its dirty work to paramilitaries and to mercenaries working for US contractors.
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Every year, 76 million unintended pregnancies occur in the developing world alone. Nineteen million of these end in unsafe abortion-a leading cause of maternal death. Access to family planning could prevent unplanned pregnancies, reduce the incidence of abortion and cut maternal deaths by 20 to 35 per cent.
— UNFPA State of World Population Report 2005 |
The US government now seeks to renew the expiring Plan Colombia to spend billions more to promote US corporate interests in that income-poor but resource-rich region.
Our Dual Addiction: Cocaine and Oil
From Bogota, the country's capital, our delegation flew south along the Andes to Putumayo, the department bordering Ecuador. Remote Putumayo is the vortex of the war. It's long been the heartland of Colombia's largest guerilla, the FARC.
Our Witness for Peace guides set up a meeting for us with the commander of the Villagarzone army base. Coronel Quintero had spent six months in the state of Georgia at the School of the Americas. Practically the first thing Quintero told us was that Putumayo had "two special conditions: coca and oil." When asked to tell us more about Putumayo's oil (rarely mentioned by Washington or our mainstream media), Quintero changed the subject.
Coca, the source of cocaine, is Colombia's major export. The unwholesome consequences of cocaine in the US provide the pretext for the so-called "war on drugs." However, in both the US and Colombia that war is a fig leaf for the war on the poor.
At one level, the "war on drugs" is really a war on drug revenue. Coca is the major source of income for both the paramilitaries and the FARC. As if to deny the intimate link between the army and the paramilitaries, Coronel Quintero told us the army's goal was to deprive both "bandit" groups of their drug income.
Both sides terrorize the other's civilian supporters. Both sides wage economic war on the other: the FARC prevents oil production and sabotages pipelines; the military fumigates the coca. Conveniently, this toxic fumigation clears the land of small farmers-land which may have oil beneath its surface. Over two million Colombians have been cleared from their land by such fumigation or by the armed actors' terrorism.
The Pentagon is keenly aware that the region-Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador-is rich in oil. It knows that without abundant and sustainable supplies of oil, its ability to wage ground warfare would be hamstrung. It also knows that the world oil reserves are dwindling. And it knows that whoever controls those reserves controls the world.
Some call oil "black gold." But, since virtually every nation is hooked on it, an equally apt nickname would be "black drug."
The "war on drugs," despite its almost willful failure to stem the flow of cheap and pure cocaine into the US, is indeed a drug war. It's a war for drugs: for the black drug. It aims to keep this utterly essential substance flowing north.
— For more information about the situation in Colombia and US involvement there visit the web sites of the following organizations:
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