Drug War: U.S. Aid Is Headed To Land Locked In Civil War Where Right, Left Tap Into Drug Trade. PRESIDENT CLINTON went to Colombia on Wednesday to build support for his new war effort there. In July Congress approved $1.3 billion for Clinton's ``Plan Colombia,'' a massive U.S. leap into the big muddy of anti-drug and anti-guerrilla warfare in the hemisphere's longest-running civil war. As the presidential campaign at home focuses on whose tax cut -- Al Gore's or George W. Bush's -- is the better deal, few are watching Clinton's lame-duck launch into a new Latin American quagmire with its haunting echoes of quagmires past. [continues 1328 words]
Your Tax Dollars At Work Cochabamba, Bolivia -- Josue celebrated his first birthday last month, on the Fourth of July. We were going to have a party for him. Instead the bright-eyed boy with a thick mop of black hair spent his birthday in a Bolivian jail cell with his mother, our friend Adela. While Americans celebrated the birth of justice and freedom, here Adela and Josue sat in an overcrowded jail cell, innocent victims of a "guilty until proven innocent" law that is a staple of the U.S. "War on Drugs". Our family has known Adela for eight years. A tiny woman who stands barely five feet tall, she worked as a cook in the religious retreat house where we once lived. We came to admire her most as a mother, who was raising four warm and caring daughters, and then Josue. She has now been in jail for six weeks. Her daughters are able to visit her for just two hours a day. Her case is emblematic of the cruel turn the U.S. anti-drug effort has taken here in Bolivia. [continues 1311 words]
