Pubdate: Fri, 01 Sep 2000
Source: Bergen Record (NJ)
Copyright: 2000 Bergen Record Corp.
Contact:  http://www.bergen.com/cgi-bin/feedback
Website: http://www.bergen.com/
Author: Mark Weisbrot
Note: Mark Weisbrot is the co-director of the Center for Economic and
Policy Research, a Washington-based think-tank. Readers may write to
him at CEPR, 1015 18th Street NW, Suite 200, Washington, D.C. 20036,
or e-mail him at AID TO COLOMBIA ONLY PROLONGS THE VIOLENCE

WHEN PRESIDENT CLINTON announced his trip to Colombia, he said his purpose 
was "to seek peace, to fight illicit drugs, to build its economy, and to 
deepen democracy."

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Clinton administration seeks not peace but rather a military solution 
to the 40-year-old civil war in Colombia. About three-quarters of its 
record-breaking aid package to Colombia is for the military and police. 
Like Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam, Clinton is convinced that 
superior firepower can destroy a deeply entrenched, armed insurgency.

If this requires the continuing murder of 3,000 civilians each year, or 
creating 300,000 refugees annually, that is a price that Clinton is willing 
to pay.

The term "human rights abuse" is a euphemism -- let's be honest about what 
our tax dollars are paying for in Colombia.

"They drank and danced and cheered as they butchered us like hogs," reports 
a survivor of a recent massacre described in The New York Times. He was 
describing the slaughter of 36 people in the town of El Salado, by 300 
paramilitary troops in February. The troops began bringing their victims to 
the town square on a Friday, and according to The Times, "ordered liquor 
and music, and then embarked on a calculated rampage of torture, rape, and 
killing" that lasted until Sunday. The victims included a 6-year old girl 
and an elderly woman.

The Colombian army stood by a few miles away, setting up roadblocks that 
prevented human rights and rescue workers from trying to help the 
villagers. Last month another mass killing of six people took place in 
northwest Colombia while an army helicopter hovered overhead and soldiers 
were on patrol nearby.

Nonetheless, President Clinton has now waived most of the human rights 
conditions that Congress attached to his military aid package, making it 
clear that these types of massacres would not affect U.S. policy.

This war is not about "illicit drugs," and it never has been. According to 
our own Drug Enforcement Agency, there is drug-related corruption in all 
branches of the Colombian government, including its armed forces, which are 
now the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world after 
Israel and Egypt.

The paramilitary death squads, which are closely linked to the Colombian 
military and -- according to human rights groups -- responsible for the 
vast majority of political murders, are up to their necks in drug trafficking.

Their leader recently acknowledged in a TV interview that 70 percent of 
their funding was from the drug trade. But our tax dollars will not be used 
to go after them.

Our money for Colombia will not help "build its economy," which is 
suffering through its worst recession in more than half a century. More 
than a fifth of the labor force is unemployed, and millions of peasants 
have no marketable alternatives to growing coca if they are to survive. 
Poisoning their land, rivers and other crops with aerial spraying of 
herbicides only adds further injury and more recruits for the armed conflict.

The same is true for the budget austerity ordered by the International 
Monetary Fund: with Washington's backing, these policies are likely to 
worsen the recession and increase unemployment in Colombia.

Widening the war will not "deepen democracy," but will further destroy what 
little is left of it. By giving the Colombian government and armed forces 
another enormous blank check, the Clinton administration simply encourages 
more massacres as well as impunity for the perpetrators.

There is no reason for Colombian officials to make the necessary 
concessions to negotiate an end to the conflict if they know they have 
unlimited support for war, including massacres of civilians.

The guerrilla groups are understandably wary of a situation in which they 
have no guarantees that they or their supporters could survive without 
their own armed forces. Their last attempt, in the mid-Eighties, to put 
down their arms and participate in elections was met with the slaughter of 
thousands of their supporters as well as candidates.

We can only hope that the backlash against the administration's pursuit of 
a violent solution to Colombia's civil war will continue to grow.

When Colombia's fate is left to the Colombians, then there will be a chance 
"to seek peace, build the economy, and deepen democracy."
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart