Pubdate: 1 Jul 2001 Source: Humanist, The (US) Copyright: 2001 The American Humanist Association Contact: http://humanist.net/publications/humanist-contents.html Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1016 Author: Sharon Fratepietro Note: Sharon Fratepietro is a freelance writer who has lived and traveled in Latin America. She would like to lead a delegation of humanists to Colombia. Email her at For more information on Plan Colombia see www.ciponline.org/colombia. PLAN COLOMBIA: THE HIDDEN FRONT IN THE U.S. DRUG WAR YOU would never guess you are entering one of the most dangerous countries in the world when you step off a plane at El Dorado Airport in Bogota, Colombia. Walking down the softly lit hallway in the international arrival terminal, your first impression is one of culture, beauty, and peace. Artfully arranged hieroglyphics grace the passage walls, and lightboxes depict golden artifacts from Bogota's Museo de Oro. After a friendly greeting by an efficient immigration official, your luggage appears promptly on the baggage carousel. You spot no armed guards. But then, traveling into the city, a curious sight appears over and over. You notice that every motorcycle rider wears a bright yellow vest and black helmet clearly inscribed, front and back, with the license plate number of the motorcycle. Even passengers seated behind drivers wear numbered vests and helmets. "There are many accidents," a taxi driver explains. Taking his right hand off the steering wheel, he pantomimes shooting a revolver. "And other problems." Colombia's problems include ten kidnappings for ransom every day-half the world's kidnappings last year. The problems include thousands of unsolved murders, massacres, and acts of terror committed annually. In the cities, an estimated 80 percent of the violence is street crime, the rest political. In the countryside, these statistics are reversed. The survivors are also a problem-about two million displaced people throughout Colombia, driven from their homes by violence and poverty. It Is March 2001 and I have traveled from the United States to Colombia with a human rights delegation sponsored by the faith-and-conscience based organization Witness for Peace. We are 100 grassroots people, aged twenty to eighty, including college students, retirees, and actively employed people in a wide variety of professions. Eighteen of us claim no religious affiliation; I am the only one who publicly identifies myself as a humanist and atheist, although others later tell me they have like convictions. All of us delegates have one thing in common: a compelling belief in nonviolence and social justice. Many of us remember U.S. foreign policy in Central America in the 1980s and early 1990s, when our country supported brutal Guatemalan and Salvadoran governments and their surrogate death squads, waging dirty wars against their own people to "save" them from communism. Our Witness for Peace delegation is in Colombia to see how the current U.S. foreign aid package called Plan Colombia is affecting the Colombian people. In July 2000-a U.S. presidential election year-Congress authorized spending $1.3 billion for Plan Colombia as the latest front in the U.S. drug war. About 35 percent of that amount is for anti-drug operations in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Colombia's portion is mostly military aid: $642 million for sixty Blackhawk and Huey attack helicopters, and up to 500 U.S. military advisors and 300 civilian personnel to train three counternarcotics battalions of Colombian soldiers. The remaining $218 million is for alternative development, assistance for displaced persons, and human rights and judicial reform. The European Union, asked to match U.S. funds for Plan Colombia, vigorously opposed the military aspects of the plan, predicting increased violence as a result. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the National Council of Churches also strongly protested. Colombia's neighboring countries feared a spillover of narcotrafficking, violence, and refugees. There was little debate in Congress before passing Plan Colombia. Congress heard testimony mainly from governmental and military sources. A vice-president of Occidental Petroleum, operating in Colombia for over thirty years, also lobbied for Plan Colombia. "Colombian oil," he said, "is of vital strategic importance to the United States because it reduces our dependence on oil imports from the volatile Middle East." The stated goal of Plan Colombia is to help the Colombian police aerially fumigate the country's thousands of acres of coca and poppy farms. These illicit crops are the base ingredients for 90 percent of the cocaine and most of the heroin used illegally in the United States. In the 1980s and early 1990s, U.S. assistance helped reduce coca production in Peru and Bolivia. Undeterred, however, the coca growers moved to Colombia, where the narcotraffickers were already in place. There they surpassed the growth of coca and poppies previously grown in Peru and Bolivia-despite U.S. counter-narcotics aid to Colombia ranging from $37 million in 1996, when fumigation of Colombian coca began, to $325 million in 1999. The cocaine and heroin currently fuel a multifronted war within Colombia. The war's "armed actors," as they are commonly called, include drug lords, insurgent guerrillas, paramilitary death squads, and a government army well known for colluding with the paramilitaries. For nearly forty years the Colombian government has been fighting guerrilla armies known as the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) with an estimated 17,000 troops, and the ELN (National Liberation Army) estimated at 5,000 members. The guerrillas bomb oil pipelines, kidnap for ransom, and murder both civilians and security forces. They extort protection money from coca and poppy growers and might be narcotraffickers. The illegal paramilitary death squads, known as the AUC (United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia), claim 11,000 members. The squads also admittedly traffic in drugs. The paramilitaries invade villages and cities under the pretext of looking for civilians who support the guerrillas. They torture, murder, massacre, and disappear their victims, particularly labor leaders, mayors, human rights workers, teachers, and community leaders no matter how nonpolitical. Human Rights Watch credits nearly 80 percent of last year's human rights violations to the paramilitaries, who are financed by large landowners, drug lords, and, some believe, the multinational oil firms trying to do business in Colombia. Plan Colombia's attack helicopters and military training are gifts to the Colombian army and police. The Colombian army, with about 120,000 members, has one of the worst human rights records in the hemisphere and its own reported ties to drug trafficking. The army's reputation is further sullied by active or tacit collaboration with the paramilitary death squads. The Colombian police force, also with about 120,000 members, has a cleaner record. And then there are the civilian Colombians. More than 50 percent of Colombia's 40 million people live in absolute poverty, earning less than $500 per year. In rural areas that figure is 80 percent. The official unemployment rate is only 20 percent; however, in reality only one of four holds a full-time job. While industrial-sized coca farms do exist, up to 75 percent (estimates vary) of Colombian coca and poppies are grown by subsistence farmers on as little as half an acre, with the average family farm just 2.2 acres. Legal crops bring little or no return, and few roads exist to take them to market. On the other hand, a farmer can harvest coca four or five times a year without replanting. The farmer can process 2.5 acres of coca into about two kilograms of coca paste and easily carry the paste on foot or horseback to a middle person, who pays about $1,000 per kilo. However, after subtracting farming expenses and the "tax" for the guerrillas or paramilitaries who control the given area, the farmer barely nets more than Colombia's legal minimum wage of $150 per month. This is the complex picture our Witness for Peace delegation intended to observe for eleven days. We begin our journey in Miami, Florida, with two days of training on Colombian political issues, and we split into four groups of twenty-five, spending time getting acquainted with each other. The last thing we do before leaving Miami is write a letter to our loved ones in the event we don't return. Witness for Peace will keep our letters for us, just in case. I notice that I am not the only one weeping as we write our letters. At this point the trip organizers ask each of us to confirm that we really want to go to Colombia. Everyone does, and early the next morning we fly to Bogota. Throughout our stay in Colombia, we take extraordinary security precautions, knowing there will be military, guerrilla, and paramilitary presence everywhere. Our strategy is to have a high profile. The Witness for Peace team living in Colombia has notified the U.S. Embassy, the national and local Colombian governments, and the Colombian media that our delegation is coming. As a result, newspapers and television stations have widely reported our visit. Nonetheless, when we arrive, the Colombian Defense Ministry and the U.S. Embassy make a point of telling our team leaders that our safety cannot be guaranteed. For security reasons, we go outdoors only in pairs or groups. We are careful not to discuss our mission in public or with strangers, and we guard our notes and photos closely. In the country we always wear bright blue T-shirts emblazoned front and back with the Witness for Peace logo in English and Spanish. During our first week in Bogota we meet daily at the local Mennonite Church, where we question a wide variety of visiting Colombian experts, some of whom support Plan Colombia and others who don't. The experts include human rights activists, members of indigenous tribes, economists, businesspeople, clergy, and union leaders. Some are under death threats and dare not sleep two successive nights in the same bed, but they insist that meeting with us is worth any ensuing danger to them, because telling their stories is so urgent. After a week in Bogota, we separate into groups of twentyfive and fly-because it is too dangerous to travel by road-to various parts of the country. My group goes to the departamento (state) of Cauca. It is 3:00 AM in the mud-floored kitchen of a squatters' shack in the colonia of Juan XXIII. Two compatriots from the United States and I try to sleep in a corner of the kitchen on platform beds borrowed from neighbors, as our hostess, Elsa, rises to prepare 200 arepas, traditional Colombian fare shaped like English muffins. Hours later her husband, Pablo, will strap a box of arepas onto a rickety bicycle and wheel it through a maze of mud paths to sell to neighbors. A few feet away in the kitchen is the double bed that serves Elsa, Pablo, and their two children. The baby is sick with lever and there is no money for a doctor. The voices of neighbors standing guard behind the shack murmur through the night, as the men protect us from potential invaders who could be police, paramilitaries, guerrillas, or just common criminals preying on the poor. Our Witness for Peace group is spending the night in a community of destechados-"people without roofs." In reality, they do have corrugated metal roofs on their split-bamboo shacks, but little else. They are among hundreds of thousands of families living precariously in squatters' communities because they have nowhere else to live, no money, no education, and no jobs other than what they can create with their own hands. The land the colonia is built on belongs to the railroad. It floods with each rainstorm. The next morning everyone gathers at a makeshift community shed to serve breakfast to us visiting Americans. They tell us how they became squatters when guerrillas or paramilitaries or poverty drove them from their earlier homes. They tell us how the police using sticks and spray cans of gas now try to drive them out of their shacks, how the police destroy their food and few belongings, and how the squatters fight back and refuse to leave. Where else could they go? They have organized themselves for protection and to look out for each other's needs. They have named their colonia after former Pope John XXIII, thinking it will gain them more respect from the Colombian authorities, but so far it hasn't helped. Later in the day, we travel on an open-sided bus up a mountain road to a village of poor coffee farmers in the municipality of Cajibio. About 100 people have gathered at the elementary school to hear speeches by representatives of community organizations. Each speaker matter of factly refers to the violence, killing, and massacres. They all know about Plan Colombia and call it a war plan against the Colombian people. Our hosts stage a lively skit dramatizing how they are attacked by the Colombian army, police, and paramilitaries, forcing people to become refugees from their own farmland and homes. While I am taking photos, a young farmworker takes me aside and asks in a low voice if we can help his village, invaded two days earlier by paramilitaries. He says no one can enter or leave the village, eighteen miles from where we are going to sleep that night in the homes of the coffee farmers. He escaped capture because he was working in a field outside of town when the paramilitaries arrived, but his family is trapped inside. Soon we learn that paramilitaries have invaded and sealed off six other villages in the same area, killing at least two people, and that the Colombian military has abandoned the municipality. When our Witness for Peace leader telephones the general in charge of the area, the general is annoyed. He says that he has already received calls of concern from the office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights, from Amnesty International, and from many others. He says he won't risk his men's lives just because a bunch of internationals asks him to do it. When night falls, the village leaders tell us they have a sentry committee who stay awake all night watching for intruders, with an alarm system to warn each household of danger. The leaders tell us to sleep with our clothes on in case we have to flee to the mountains during the night. They ask us to turn our Witness for Peace T-shirts inside out so the white logo cannot reflect the glow from a flashlight. The night passes quietly. When we leave the next morning, the villagers thank us for coming. One says that until she met us she thought all Americans were hard, like former presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush. We travel on to the capital city of Popayan in Cauca to meet its indigenous governor, Floro Tunubala. He shares our concern about the invaded villages, but he has no authority over the military. He has just returned from visiting the United States to propose an alternative Plan Colombia-one that would effectively fund voluntary eradication of the coca farms instead of aerial fumigation. Existing funds in Plan Colombia for alternative crops are reaching few farmers. That night at our hotel, a high government official, whose name and office I can't reveal because his life is in such danger, urgently requests a meeting with our group. He begs us, as U.S. citizens, to do everything possible to urge the military to rescue the people of Cajibio. He tells us the paramilitaries are only seven kilometers from the county seat and that the army is nearby but has had no contact with the people. He has no way of knowing how many villagers have been killed so far. The next day we attend a previously scheduled meeting with Colombian Lieutenant, Colonel Ricardo Velandia, battalion commander of the army near Cajibio. He confirms to us that his soldiers did leave the invaded area because no one would identify the occupying paramilitaries. He says his few resources are severely limited by a priority to protect the Pan American Highway but that he has recently sent some troops back to Cajibio. While we are meeting, he takes a phone call reporting that the International Red Cross is on its way to Cajibio. After three days in the country, we return to Bogota to share observations with our companion groups which have been in other parts of the country The delegates who went to the departamento of Putumayo tell us what happened after Colombian police in crop-dusting airplanes, guarded by U.S.-supplied attack helicopters, sprayed an estimated 62,000 acres of coca earlier this year with Roundup Ultra herbicide. Half the coca in Colombia grows in Putumayo. The delegates have seen massive fields of withered coca, along with many acres of essential food crops killed as well. They have seen an empty chicken coop and a former fishpond poisoned by the fumigation-two replacement projects established previously by farmers who had voluntarily removed their coca. Farmers have testified that the herbicide, composed of glyphosate and surfactants, has poisoned water supplies and farm animals. They have described medical problems that appeared after the spraying, and our delegates have seen children whose bodies were covered with sores attributed by doctors to the herbicide. That afternoon, an executive contingent of U.S. Embassy officials visits our delegation to talk things over. We aren't allowed to identify any of them by name or function. We tell them what we have seen and heard over the past few days. One official responds that farmers deliberately plant food crops amid the coca to fool the crop-dusters. He agrees that some legal farms on the edge of the coca fields are unavoidably sprayed. He insists that Roundup Ultra is perfectly safe. He doesn't mention that the Roundup Ultra used in Colombia contains a combination of ingredients some opponents claim have never been tested for safety in combination, nor does he mention the 1999 Swedish medical study suggesting a possible link between glyphosate and non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He also doesn't mention that just a few days earlier, four Colombian governors, including the governors of Putumayo and Cauca, visited Washington, D.C., to protest Plan Colombia. The governors said that Plan Colombia had not been discussed with the Colombian people, and that the fumigation of coca since 1996 has caused economic and environmental destruction and illnesses that include birth defects. Another U.S. Embassy official defends the U.S. involvement in Colombia by saying that the United States is only doing in Colombia what it did in the past for the government of El Salvador, where "their focus was our focus, their problems our concerns as well." And he doesn't blush as he says this. When the meeting ends, I ask one of the U.S. Embassy officials privately what is being done to help the people trapped by the paramilitaries in Cajibio municipality. "What would you like us to do?" he asks. "Urge President Pastrana to send enough military to protect the people," I answer. "Don't you think this is happening elsewhere in the country?" he asks. "Of course I do," I reply. "Well, that's your answer," he says. "It's a big country and there are not enough troops to go around." I never learned if the paramilitary invasion of Cajibio ended, since we had to leave Colombia a few days later. This story happens so often that even the international news media seldom reports it. While in Colombia, I heard many opinions about the drug war, the coca, and Plan Colombia. There is a wide disconnection between the Colombian upper classes, government, military, and the poor. However, everyone charged that the government of Colombia is corrupt. Everyone said the guerrillas and coca will never be stopped by military force but only through massive financial aid to address social and economic inequities. Many people told us the coca growers are simply moving deeper into the Amazon jungle to escape the crop-dusters. Many also agreed that, by supporting the Colombian military through Plan Colombia, the United States also supports the paramilitary death squads who serve as the vanguard of the Colombian army. And almost everyone asked the same question: why does the United States blame Colombia for the U.S. drug problem, rather than seriously address the demand? Recent News About Colombia: When all funding channels are considered, the Bush administration's proposed 2002 "Andean Initiative" would fund Colombia and its neighbors at nearly $1.1 billion-54 percent of its military and police assistance. George W. Bush nominated Otto J. Reich for the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Reich ran the State Department's now defunct Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean from 1983-1986. A General Accounting Office report in 1987 said Reich's department carried out an illegal propaganda operation by secretly planting news stories and opinion articles in U.S. media designed to rally support for the Reagan administration policy in Central America. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake