Plan Colombia Up for a Vote: Take the Opportunity to Say No to a Forgotten

[Judi Lynn]

Published on Thursday, June 23, 2005 by Working for Change
Plan Colombia Up for a Vote: Take the Opportunity to Say No to a Forgotten, Senseless War
by Geov Parrish

Amidst the disaster that is Iraq, the Pentagon has been fighting a smaller but no less ugly war. Next week, Congress will decide whether to continue sending military aid to Colombia, a country with one of the worst human rights records in the western hemisphere.
The focus of the aid is Plan Colombia, a five-year-old plan that has poured billions of U.S. dollars into drug crop fumigation and military aid. The plan expires this year, and needs Congressional approval to continue. It's a rare opportunity to impact U.S. warmaking -- yet, in part because of the subsequent, problematic invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, there has been virtually no U.S. media attention on what our tax dollars are assisting in Colombia.
(snip)

Those guerrillas are the main reason Plan Colombia's aid has steadily shifted from drug-interdictment to the even messier business of being directly involved in Colombia's long running, 45-year-old civil war. Next week's vote will be the first time Plan Colombia itself, rather than budgetary allocations for it, will come up for a Congressional vote -- and the first time that Plan Colombia will have come up for a vote in the context of the War on Terror.

To that end, the Bush administration has actually been painting FARC as a terrorist threat to the U.S. -- even though no evidence for such outlandish claims exists, and FARC has had 45 years to declare that the U.S. is a target. Instead, they are very much focused on the urban areas of Colombia, being concentrated in the jungle areas of Colombia's south and east.
(snip/...)

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0623-29.htm