Inside Colombia (Your tax dollars at work)

[Say_What]

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Mariela Kohon: In your recently published book Inside Colombia, you state that Plan Colombia has been turned from a peace plan into a ‘battle plan’ and that ‘the military element is by far the most important’. What is Plan Colombia and what do you mean by this statement?

Grace Livingstone: There were two versions of Plan Colombia. The first version was written in Spanish by Colombians in May 1999. It was not particularly radical, but it was a peace and development plan which aimed to dissuade peasants from growing coca crops or joining armed groups by investing in alternative rural development and education. It did not mention drugs trafficking, military action or spraying crops with pesticides.

US officials re-wrote the draft entirely in October 1999. Their involvement was so extensive that the final version of Plan Colombia was published in English – not Spanish. Strengthening the authority of the state (by re-equipping and expanding the armed forces) became the main objective. An intensive militarised crop spraying campaign was also introduced. The US basically transformed Plan Colombia to meet their own perceived security needs – that is, the need to combat the Colombian guerrillas. It was used as a vehicle to step up counter-insurgency aid and US military involvement in Colombia at a time when combating drugs was the only acceptable pretext for intervention.

Some have argued that Colombia’s recently elected president, Alvaro Uribe Velez, with the backing of the US, is imposing ‘state terrorism’. What are your thoughts on this?

Colombia’s human rights record was so appalling in the 1990s that the US Congress banned all military aid to Colombia, except counter-narcotics aid. Of course, the counter-drugs aid found its way to counter-insurgency units and to the paramilitaries, but at least US politicians showed some awareness of the human rights problem. The ban also stemmed from a desire not to repeat the horrors of US foreign policy in Central America in the 1980s. Under the auspices of fighting communism, an illegal and cruel war was launched in Nicaragua, thousands were ‘disappeared’ in El Salvador and 200,000 people were murdered in Guatemala.

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/

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Colombia background

A brief background to the situation in Colombia prepared by the UK-based Colombia Peace Association.

For the past 50 years the South American nation of Colombia has been in a state of civil war. The conflict intensified when the government terminated peace talks with the FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People's Army) rebel movement in February 2002, and this was further compounded when right-wing hardliner Alvaro Uribe Velez assumed the presidency in August 2002 and immediately declared a state of emergency - ushering in an even more repressive environment.

A central element of the Colombian conflict is the widespread and systematic violation of human rights; indeed, Colombia has the worst record in the Western Hemisphere. Agents of the State, most notably the Colombian police, military and the paramilitary death squads grouped under the AUC umbrella, routinely target large sectors of the civilian population for assassination, 'disappearance', torture and forced displacement. Those most affected by this State-sponsored terror include trade unionists, human rights workers, land-reform advocates, community leaders, students, academics, journalists and entire rural communities, including a disproportionately high number of indigenous and Afro-Colombian people.

Despite this appalling state of affairs, Colombia remains the third largest recipient of United States military aid in the world, with the now infamous 'Plan Colombia' alone having supplied billion in military training and hardware in recent years. Although this aid was given using the pretext of the 'War on Drugs', even Washington now admits that their real target are the growing insurgencies of the FARC-EP and ELN (National Liberation Army).

This counter-insurgency assistance is aimed at pushing the rebels and their civilian supporters out of regions rich in natural resources. Although the Colombian army and paramilitaries are responsible for the vast majority of this forced displacement, the U.S. too is responsible for driving tens of thousands from their land through a vicious campaign of chemical warfare, similar to the use of 'Agent Orange' in Vietnam.

http://www.anncol.org/side/41