Colext/Macondo
Cantina virtual de los COLombianos en el EXTerior
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Comenta PANG:
George F. Will (quien escribe este articulo) es uno de los columnistas
mas "goditos" en gringolandia. Veamos lo que dice de la situa en
Locombia:
President Clinton's assurances that the United States will not
get involved in the Colombian civil war that the United States already
is
involved in (with military personnel, equipment, training, financing,
intelligence) make sense if you think of the helicopters as farm
implements. The 60 transport and attack helicopters and most of the
other
elements in the recent $1.3 billion installment of U.S. aid look
warlike.
However, the administration says the aid is essentially agricultural. It
is
all about controlling crops - particularly the coca fields that provide
upward of 90 percent of the cocaine that reaches the American market.
The law governing U.S. intervention includes this language: "The
president
shall ensure that if any helicopter procured with funds under this
heading
is used to aid or abet the operations of an illegal self-defense group
or
illegal security cooperative, then such helicopter shall be immediately
returned to the United States." Imagine how reliably this will be
enforced.
Conceivably, important U.S. interests are implicated in the Colombian
government's fight with the more than 17,000-strong forces of Marxist
insurgency in the civil war, now in its fourth decade, that has killed
35,000 people and displaced 2 million in the last 10 years. Political
violence has killed 280,000 since the middle of the 19th century. Do
makers
of U.S. policy understand this long-simmering stew of class conflict,
ideological war and ethnic vendettas?
They advertise their policy as drug control through crop extermination.
The
president, delivering the money that will buy military equipment, said:
"We
have no military objective." And: "Our approach is both pro- peace and
anti-drug." As though the civil war and the anti-narcotics campaign can
be
separated when the left-wing forces that control half the country are
getting hundreds of millions of dollars a year by protecting and taxing
coca fields.
The U.S. policy - peace through herbicides - aims to neutralize the
left-wing forces by impoverishing them. But already those forces are
diversifying. The Wall Street Journal reports: "Armed with automatic
rifles
and personal computers, guerrillas often stop traffic, check motorists'
bank records, then detain anyone whose family might be able to afford a
lucrative ransom." There are an average of seven kidnappings a day, and
the
Journal reports that every morning Colombia's largest radio network
links
its 169 stations with its stations in Miami, New York, Panama and Paris.
It
opens its lines to relatives of kidnap victims who broadcast messages
they
hope will be heard by their missing loved ones."
SPEAKING OF DIVERSIFICATION, does anyone doubt that, in the extremely
unlikely event that Colombia is cleansed of the offensive crops,
cultivation of them will be promptly increased elsewhere? In spite of
Colombia's efforts, coca cultivation increased 140 percent in the last
five
years, partly because the United States financed the reduction of
Bolivia's
coca crop. However, the pressure on Colombia's coca growers is
"working":
Some of them have planted crops (and the seeds of future conflicts)
across
the border in Peru. And guerrillas have made incursions into Panama and
Ecuador for refuge. And the price of cocaine in the United States has
plummeted for two decades.
Will the United States ever learn? As long as it has a $50 billion
annual
demand for an easily smuggled substance made in poor nations, the demand
will be served. //--!!chas --!chas!! (corto aca para que no digan que
copie todo el articulo...)
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