The Washington Peace Letter is published monthly for the social justice community of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Its purpose is to support local, national and international struggles against oppression. It seeks to present a radical analysis of current events, covering information not readily available in the corporate media.

The Peace Letter welcomes submissions of calendar announcements, articles, letters to the Editor, and artwork from the progressive community. Articles may be from 300-1200 words, but may be edited for space considerations. Preference is given to materials that cover actions or organizing campaigns in the D.C. metropolitan area.

We reserve the right to select or reject any submission.

Except as noted, Peace Letter items are copyright free and may be reproduced. Please give credit and send us a copy if you do use something.

Witnessing the Devastation of U.S. Aid in Colombia
by Tanya Snyder

March/April 2002
Volume 39, number 2

The War on Terrorism has hit Colombia.

Granted, the War on Drugs has been giving Colombia quite a beating for years. But while all U.S. military aid until this point has been for counternarcotics purposes only, President Bush is trying to allow new aid to be used for counterinsurgency and the protection of infrastructure from rebel attacks.

Eradicating coca where it is grown is an ineffective counternarcotics strategy in the first place. According to a U.S. government-funded study, treatment on demand for addicts is twenty-three times more effective than source-country eradication in reducing rates of drug addiction. As long as there's a demand for cocaine, there will be a supply of coca, whether in Bolivia, Colombia, or elsewhere.

Still, the restrictions on the aid were purposeful. The U.S. government was, after all, giving massive amounts of military aid to the military with the worst human rights record in the hemisphere. Our government stuck with the "counternarcotics" label because "counterinsurgency" brings up ugly memories of the Contra war in Nicaragua, not to mention Vietnam. Presidents Clinton and G.W. Bush had to constantly reassure Congress that we weren't getting "sucked in" to another "quagmire."

Welcome to the Quagmire
On February 4, President Bush sent his budget proposal for 2003 to Congress, containing the largest military expenditures in twenty years. The proposal earmarked about $600 million for Colombia. $98 million of this money will be used to train a new brigade to protect economic infrastructure.

If you already guessed this had something to do with oil, give yourself a pat on the back. "Economic infrastructure" translates neatly into "Occidental Petroleum's oil pipeline," which was attacked by rebels no less than 166 times last year. Though not all of the oil in the Ca–o Lim—n-Cove–as pipeline in northeastern Colombia is owned by Oxy, it is clear that U.S. economic interests are driving U.S. military policy.

The "terrorism" aspect of all this is clear too. Colombia is home to three groups on the State Department's terrorist list - the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the paramilitary group known as the Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). All groups have major human rights violations on their hands, and all are a danger to civilians. Although the paramilitaries are responsible for 80% of the deaths associated with Colombia's conflict, the Colombian government works with them. Links between the paramilitaries and the Colombian armed forces are clear and well-documented. This means that U.S. military aid is going to known terrorists and human rights abusers.

A quick summary for the newcomers: Colombia has never experienced an agrarian reform. Out of La Violencia, a period of extreme violence and warfare from 1948-58, sprang the FARC demanding land reform and social justice. The Colombian state was so weak it had no presence whatsoever in many areas of the country, and so the guerrillas were able to control territory themselves. Then large land-owners, cattle-ranchers, and drug lords established the Self-Defense Forces (first regional, then nationwide) to defend themselves against guerrilla aggression. The Self-Defense Forces, or paramilitaries, work closely with the armed forces, sharing intelligence and equipment.

For example, the military will give the paramilitaries information on "guerrilla activity" in a certain area (note that "guerrilla activity" may be just what it sounds like, but it can also be code for anyone the armed forces or the paramilitaries wish to eliminate). The military will then set up a roadblock so no one can get in or out except the paramilitaries, who will go in, commit a massacre, and then leave. This sort of collusion is known and documented.

Meanwhile, the FARC kill and kidnap innocent people too. Progressives do not oppose U.S. aid because they support the FARC. The FARC's rhetoric of social justice is buried in too much blood for it to be taken seriously. But U.S. aid will only escalate the war and create an arms race in which the FARC will step up their tactics to accumulate more wealth and weaponry. And how have they historically done this? Kidnapping and coca production. U.S. aid is directly producing more of exactly what it seeks to stop.

My Winter Vacation
I was in Colombia in January with a Witness for Peace/Global Exchange delegation on the themes of labor and the environment. Although there are not bullets whizzing past your head at every moment, the devastation of the country is clear from the fear in people's eyes.

In Putumayo, the southernmost province of Colombia and the region with the greatest coca cultivation, the highest homicide rate, and the most intense treatment by Plan Colombia, we saw a body that had washed up on the riverbank in the same site where a massacre killed 35 people two years before. We tried to figure out who the person was, but conflicting news reports made it impossible. Was it a paramilitary killed by guerrillas, a guerrilla killed by paramilitaries, a civilian killed by either of the two; was it one person killed among others or was he killed alone? In a country with 30,000 violent deaths every year, this one is not exceptional in its anonymity.

We visited farms in Putumayo that had been hit by the aerial fumigation. The U.S. and Colombian governments are attempting to eradicate coca by spraying Round-Up and a variety of other substances - they won't allow independent verification of the ingredients - on coca fields. There are several problems with the spraying as it's happening now. First of all, farmers grow coca because it fetches the best price on the market, and buyers are willing to come to them to pick it up. This is much more convenient than loading produce on a truck and carrying it to a market. Second, neo-liberal economic policies have depressed the prices for alternative crops like coffee or rice, largely by flooding the Colombian market with cheap U.S. imports. Third, although the U.S. government claims that the spray mixture is safe, Colombian human rights agencies have been bombarded by complaints of health and environmental effects of the chemicals. Complaints of abdominal pain went up over 1000%; people also complained of fever, diarrhea, skin rashes, respiratory problems, and more. Farmers also saw their animals die and their legal crops destroyed.

Many farmers have signed "social pacts" with the government, where the farmer agrees to eradicate their coca in return for US$865 worth of alternative development aid from the government. From the time of their first allotment of aid, the farmer has twelve months to eradicate before they face any threat of new fumigation. The farmers we met with had signed the pacts, and although they hadn't received any aid yet whatsoever, they had started to eradicate their coca and grow alternative crops, sometimes at great personal expense.

Their farms were fumigated anyway.

It was terrible to see them surrounded by rotting yucca and corn, the crops that were supposed to keep them alive for the next year, throwing up their hands in utter despair and the anger of betrayal. A U.S. government official admits that they have no maps to show farms covered by social pacts which are therefore exempt from fumigation. The word of the government, to these people, is not worth the paper it's written on.

We presented the U.S. embassy with an invoice for the US$12,000 that Don Ismael Cuaran had borrowed and spent to plant 2500 posts with black pepper plants, all of which had died in the last round of fumigation, despite the fact that he'd signed a pact and had received no aid. The U.S. embassy officials, while practically denying that we saw what we saw, said they would "investigate."

Displacement
When people are left with dead crops, many just move on, joining 2 million other Colombians in internal displacement, moved from their homes by violence, threats or fumigations. Fumigation-related displacement creates more deforestation as people move on and plant coca deeper in the Amazon rainforest.

So if the U.S. and Colombian governments are fumigating legal crops, dishonoring social pacts, and ignoring evidence that our operations in Colombia will never affect U.S. drug consumption anyway, we're left with this question: is this really about drugs after all?

Or does it have more to do with oil, like Occidental's pipeline in the Middle Magdalena region? Or mega-projects like the canal that's supposed to be bigger and better than Panama's; the dam project in the works; or completion of an intercontinental highway? Is it possible that much of Colombia's violence has more to do with the strategic value of the land than who or what may be on it? Could this all be a game of real estate speculation? Looking at the realities of how the war and the War on Drugs have progressed, many Colombians we spoke to were convinced that the true motives of the war were economic, and that civilians caught in the crossfire were just the unfortunate victims of a great, greedy land-grab.

As a citizen of the United States, I feel called to stand with the Colombians brutalized by our governments' policies. In April, I will be leaving D.C. to join Witness for Peace's International Team, living and working in Colombia to change U.S. policy. Much of the job will consist of leading delegations like the one I just returned from, so that U.S. citizens can see the effects of their country's policies. Since Witness for Peace was founded in response to the Contra war in Nicaragua, a large part of the purpose has simply been for U.S. citizens to put their bodies on the line where the United States thought there would be only the brown bodies they consider disposable. I feel called to go to the place where our government thinks it can hide devastation, to be a witness to it, and to take the most defiant stance I can muster in opposition to the United States' role in escalating a terrible, brutal, tragic conflict.

---

To learn more, to get involved with activism around Colombia, including April's Colombia Mobilization, or to get more information on delegations, contact Witness for Peace at 202-588-1471, www.witnessforpeace.org.

Back to Top