Pubdate: Thu, 27 Jul 2000
Source: Guardian Weekly, The (UK)
Copyright: Guardian Publications 2000
Contact:  75 Farringdon Road London U.K EC1M 3HQ
Fax: 44-171-242-0985
Website: http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/GWeekly/front/
Author: Duncan Campbell

DRUGS IN THE FIRING LINE

One side is paid for by the US military, the other by addicts. Welcome
to Colombia's civil war

The United States is currently holding 400,000 prisoners of war in
jails across the country. Most of them have never picked up a weapon
or threatened anyone and many of them know they will die in jail, far
from their families.

They are prisoners who have been taken by the US government in what is
known as the "war on drugs". Now the US government has decided to
devote a further $1.3bn of its citizens' money towards fighting this
war on a foreign field - or in many foreign fields - by supplying
military aid to the Colombian government and by seeking the backing
and approval of Europe in this task.

Essentially the US is to provide the stick in the form of helicopters
and weaponry to tackle drug producers while Europe provides a carrot -
or more likely a banana crop - in the form of aid for the development
of crops that will replace the coca and the opium poppy on which so
much of the Colombian economy relies.

Earlier this month 27 nations and international agencies attended a
conference in Madrid to discuss Plan Colombia, the scheme under which
the US has committed itself to the destruction of drugs in Colombia. A
total of more than $800m was pledged by a variety of countries and
bodies, but crucially the European Union will wait until September and
another meeting in Bogota before deciding exactly what its commitment
will be.

Officially the weapons and helicopters are to be used to attack the
coca and opium poppy fields. Unofficially the hardware is to be used
to destroy the 17,000-strong, well-armed Marxist guerrilla group the
Farc (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), which receives much
of its revenue as a result of the drugs trade. Europe is being asked,
as one European diplomat has been quoted as saying, "to clean up the
mess that the Americans will make".

Over recent weeks President Clinton has been talking thoughtfully and
sensitively about the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and the part he
hopes that he can play before he leaves office. Every effort is being
made to try to bring the two sides together. As the peace process in
Northern Ireland has been stumbling slowly towards resolution, the US
government has always been prepared to offer its help it mediating
between the two sides in an effort to broker a lasting peace.

Some weeks ago ministers and officials from Europe, Japan, Canada and
the United Nations made their way to Los Pozos in the heart of the
territory of Colombia given temporarily to the Farc. There they
listened to Colombians on both sides of the civil war and heard the
arguments for and against Plan Colombia. The US were not represented
at the meeting because they do not "recognise" the Farc.

Where is the energy that has categorised US initiatives in the Middle
East and Ireland? Some have suggested that the US commitment of so
much military aid will unleash a Latin American Vietnam.

Others have likened it to the proxy war fought by the US against the
leftist guerrillas in El Salvador. All are agreed that this escalation
of the 36-year-long civil war will mean a marked increase in deaths.
Whatever one's views of the Farc and what they stand for, they are
well trained, well armed and many are highly committed to the war.
They will be fighting in territory they know well.

Leading the charge, almost literally, for the Americans is the drugs
tsar, General Barry McCaffrey. He recently appeared on BBC television
in a documentary about Colombia and claimed that the "greatest threat"
to human rights in Colombia was the Farc and that it posed "a huge
threat not only for its neighbours but also the US".

This is nonsense. All the human rights reports, whether from the
United Nations or the US's own state department, indicate that the
"greatest threat" to human rights is posed by the far-right
paramilitaries or "self-defence" groups that have worked so often with
the Colombian military.

As the US state department's human rights report, dated February, put
it: "Paramilitary forces were responsible for an increasing number of
massacres and other politically motivated killings. . . the army
tolerated and even collaborated with paramilitary groups."

McCaffrey has an old-fashioned  military man's attitude to facts. In
1998 he attacked the liberal Dutch drugs policy by claiming that this
had led to a crime wave and that the murder rate in the Netherlands
was twice that in the US. "That's drugs," was the general's
conclusion. That was also nonsense. The US murder rate is in fact four
times higher than the Dutch figure. Now McCaffrey, having convinced
the US government to hurl money from the skies on to Colombia in
battle and in fumigation programmes, hopes that Europe will politely
follow suit.

There are three schools of thought about European involvement in Plan
Colombia: the US government view, that they should cough up the money and
keep their mouths shut; the view that Europe should have not been
associated with a plan that seems doomed towards escalating the war at a
time when peace talks - however slow and faltering - are taking place; and
the third view, that Europe should attach itself to the plan if only so
that there is another voice that can try to get itself heard above the
noise of the choppers taking off.

Drugs in the US are a problem for the US, however convenient it may be
to blame Latin Americans. Recently the tiny US Libertarian party
launched its bid for the presidency by saying that its first act if -
rather a big if - elected would be the pardoning of every non-violent
drug offender. If the US was really serious about its "war on drugs"
those are the steps they would be looking at to remove the grip of
organised international crime from the drugs trade. With all the money
saved, they could help address Colombia's real problem: poverty. As
the signs carried by some of the hundreds of thousands displaced by
the conflict who descended on Bogota last month said: "With hunger,
there is no peace."

Instead, there is the possibility of a grim war fought by Colombians,
a civil war in which one side will be funded by the US taxpayer and
the other side by the US drug-taker - a mad scenario indeed. Europe
has a chance to use its influence, either by withholding its support
from the plan and then involving itself actively in searching for a
peaceful solution or, if it backs the plan, by using its influence to
try to stop what could be the next of this millennium's bloody civil
conflicts.
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