Oil Rigged
There’s something slippery about
the U.S. drug war in Colombia
By THAD DUNNING
and LESLIE WIRPSA
The public face of U.S. policy toward Colombia has long been the war on drugs. Colombia, according to widely reported CIA estimates, produces 90 percent of the U.S. cocaine supply and 65 percent of U.S. heroin imports. U.S. officials say the aim of Plan Colombia, a $1.3 billion aid package signed by President Clinton last year, is fighting “narco-guerrillas” and eradicating coca crops.
But that’s just part of the agenda. Plan Colombia is also about oil.
Colombia’s petroleum production today rivals Kuwait’s on the eve of the Gulf War. The United States imports more oil from Colombia and its neighbors Venezuela and Ecuador than from all Persian Gulf countries combined. And, last June, Colombia announced its largest oil discovery since the 1980s. The Colombian government and transnational oil companies are eager to secure their exploration and production activities with U.S. military might.
Some U.S. military officials harbor no illusions about their role in Colombia. Stan Goff, a former U.S. Special Forces intelligence sergeant, retired in 1996 from the unit that trains Colombian anti-narcotics battalions. Plan Colombia’s purpose is “defending the operations of Occidental, British Petroleum and Texas Petroleum and securing control of future Colombian fields,” said Goff, quoted in October by the Bogotá daily El Espectador. “The main interest of the United States is oil.”
Colombia’s two major guerrilla groups condemn foreign control of the nation’s petroleum even as they rely on the oil companies for ransoms and extortion payments. The guerrillas face competition from rightist death squads known as paramilitaries, many with documented links to Bogotá’s army and some with alleged ties to the oil firms.
More:
http://www.americas.org/index.php?cp=item&item_id=115===
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)
and the Illicit Drug Trade
Written by Ricardo Vargas Meza
Transnational Institute (TNI), The Netherlands
Acción Andina, Cochabamba, Bolivia
Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), Washington, DC
June 1999
Here:
http://www.tni.org/drugs/pubs/farc.htm====
FAS Arms Sales Monitoring Project profile of Columbia
Between 1989 and 1999, the United States exported over half a billion dollars worth of weaponry to Colombia, most of it financed with U.S. counter-narcotics assistance. The U.S. has consistently aided the Colombian government, in particular the Colombian police, to combat illicit drug trafficking. With the 1998 election of President Pastrana, the Clinton Administration expressed greater support for military aid. The Colombian military has cleaned up its human rights record significantly, but there is still continued evidence of ties between the military and paramilitary forces that are responsible for the vast majority of atrocities in Colombia.
Colombia is plagued by violence, as guerrilla groups challenge often repressive central government and right-wing paramilitary groups for authority in much of the country. According to the 2002 State Department Human Rights report, 8,000 to 15,000 rightist guerrillas and 21,645 leftist guerrillas comprising more than 100 semiautonomous groups are operating in Colombia. Three of these groups, the FARC, the ELN, and the AUC have been designated as terrorist organizations by the State Department. These guerrilla groups have exercised a significant degree of influence and initiated armed action in nearly 1,000 of the country's 1,085 municipalities. The major guerrilla organizations received a significant part of their revenues (in the hundreds of millions of dollars) from fees levied on narcotics production and trafficking.
<snip>
Throughout the country, paramilitary groups killed, tortured, and threatened civilians suspected of sympathizing with guerrillas in an orchestrated campaign to terrorize them into fleeing their homes, thereby depriving guerrillas of civilian support. Paramilitary forces were responsible for an increasing number of massacres and other politically motivated killings. The army's record in dealing with paramilitary groups remained mixed. In some locations the army on rare occasions attacked and captured members of such groups; in others it tolerated or even collaborated with paramilitary groups. Violence and instability in rural areas displaced approximately 288,000 civilians from their homes during the year. The total number of internally displaced citizens during 1995-99 probably exceeded 1 million.
<snip>
In the bill passed by the Senate, firm human rights criteria were placed on the transfer of military aid and training. But in the House-Senate conference, the conditions were weakened, and a presidential waiver was added.
Senate language stressing military-paramilitary links was also added to House language stressing counter-narcotics goals. President Clinton did eventually use his right to waive the human rights criteria, all but one of which had not been met. The only remaining check on the distribution of military aid and training is the "Leahy Law," which prohibits U.S. training and aid to go to specific military units "if the Secretary of State has credible evidence to believe such unit has committed gross violations of human rights, unless the Secretary determines and reports to the Committees on Appropriations that the government of such country is taking steps to bring the responsible members of the security forces units to justice." The law is now well known by U.S. officials operating in Colombia and has already been applied to some Colombian units.
<snip>
Changes in the scope and nature of U.S. aid to Colombia are in the works. The administration's Fiscal Year
2003 budget included a request for over $370 million in military aid for Colombia which --if granted-- would make this country the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world. The budget also seeks an additional $98 million to protect a Colombian oil pipeline which has become a frequent focus of rebel attacks. <snip>
More:
http://www.fas.org/asmp/profiles/colombia.htm===
COLOMBIA
The Ties That Bind: Colombia and Military-Paramilitary Links
SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Human Rights Watch here presents detailed, abundant, and compelling evidence of continuing close ties between the Colombian Army and paramilitary groups responsible for gross human rights violations.
This information was compiled by Colombian government investigators and Human Rights Watch. Several of our sources, including eyewitnesses, requested anonymity because their lives have been under threat as a result of their testimony.
Far from moving decisively to sever ties to paramilitaries, Human Rights Watch's evidence strongly suggests that Colombia's military high command has yet to take the necessary steps to accomplish this goal. Human Rights Watch's information implicates Colombian Army brigades operating in the country's three largest cities, including the capital, Bogotá. If Colombia's leaders cannot or will not halt these units' support for paramilitary groups,
the government's resolve to end human rights abuse in units that receive U.S. security assistance must be seriously questioned. <snip>
Together, evidence collected so far by Human Rights Watch links half of Colombia's eighteen brigade-level army units (excluding military schools) to paramilitary activity. These units operate in all of Colombia's five divisions. In other words, military support for paramilitary activity remains national in scope and includes areas where units receiving or scheduled to receive U.S. military aid operate.
More:
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/colombia/ ====
Colombia's civil war puts children on the front lines
January 11, 2001 | BUCARAMANGA, Colombia -- When they came to recruit Ana, they told her she wouldn't have to work and that she could see her mom and her grandmother whenever she wanted. Instead, leftist guerrillas taught the 13-year-old girl how to kill and marched her off to fight in the mountains of northern Colombia, where she nearly starved before surrendering.
"I was aware that on any day I could die, or that I might get hurt," said Ana (not her real name). "But I didn't cry once during the fighting."
It has long been known that the numerous armed factions in the Andean nation's 36-year civil conflict have used children to fight their battles, but the stories that Ana and others like her tell about their defeated guerrilla column -- part of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC -- reveal that the problem is worse than anyone thought.
In a series of skirmishes that began in November, 128 guerrillas enlisted in the so-called Arturo Ruiz Column have either surrendered or been captured by the Colombian army, while an additional 63 -- including 27 children -- have been killed. The approximately 170 insurgents who survived the pummeling are now surrounded and being worn down by at least 1,000 soldiers, who are reveling in their lopsided victory after a series of bruising defeats suffered by the army in other parts of the country.
"From the stats coming out of this event, we've gathered that 46 percent of the original group were children," said Carol De Rooy, director of the UNICEF office in Colombia. "If this sample is realistic, we are grossly underestimating the number of children in this armed conflict. Either that, or they're putting the kids out on the front lines, which is just as bad."
<snip>
http://dir.salon.com/mwt/feature/2001/01/11/colombian_children/index.html
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