> interdict the drugs. Following the script, McCaffrey
> agrees that this is urgently necessary but points out
> that the Colombians lack enough trained helicopter
> pilots, implying that the Colombians should use U.S.
> personnel, either current or "retired" military who would
> be hired as soldiers of fortune. In fact, as Tod
> Robberson of the Dallas Morning News has reported,
> large numbers of such "ex-military" mercenaries already
> have been recruited. (20)
>
> At present, Colombia is the fourth largest recipient of
> U.S. aid-after Israel, Egypt, and Jordan-with most of
> the aid in the form of arms. U.S. officials have ceased
> even to pretend seriously that the aid is to combat
> cocaine trafficking. (21)
>
> Washington's orchestrated attack on President Pastrana
> seems ironic. The Harvard graduate from Colombia's
> ruling élite was perceived by ordinary Colombians as
> having been handpicked by U.S. officials. (22)
>
> As part of the attack on Pastrana, the media blitz has
> begun highlighting Colombia's desperate economic
> straits, including the worst depression in decades, a
> growing debt burden and a 20 percent unemployment
> rate. That unemployment rate compares favorably with
> a number of Latin American governments considered
> "friendly" to Washington and much-praised in the U.S.
> corporate media. The fact that the media are showing
> such unusual concern for Colombia's unemployed adds to
> the feeling in Bogotá that U.S. authorities are setting
> Pastrana up for the chopping block. (23)
>
> The same news reports credulously pass along
> intelligence agency claims that Colombia has managed
> to develop a new super-strain of coca leaf, making it
> unnecessary for drug dealers to import the material from
> Peru and Bolivia, as in the past, and asserting that
> Colombian "narco-guerrillas" are earning fantastic
> revenues as a result.
>
> No effort is made to explain the obvious discrepancy
> between Colombia's undoubted economic straits and the
> fantastic new wealth supposedly pouring into the
> country because of the "super-strain" of drugs. If the
> claim that at least $5 billion in drug profits flow into
> Colombia annually is accurate, that amounts to $125 per
> year for every adult and child in Colombia. (A
> subsequent AP report on a mass arrest of alleged
> Colombian drug dealers claimed that the gang was
> earning $5 billion a month. (24))
>
> Undeterred, the media also continue to cite a CIA report
> that coca crops increased 28% in Colombia last year.
> That report was rejected by Colombian National Police
> Chief Rosso José Serrano, who, the Colombia Bulletin
> reports, showed his own aerial photographs and satellite
> images obtained from the French space agency to
> counter the CIA assertions.
>
> "The worldwide chief of the U.N. Drug Control Program,
> Pino Arlacchi, said CIA methods fall short because the
> agency relies almost exclusively on satellites, rarely
> checking on the ground to see if the coca plants are,
> indeed, dead," the Bulletin reported. (25)
>
> While there may not be an "explosion" of coca leaf
> cultivation, it is probably true that it has increased as
> transnational corporations (mostly oil and mining) and
> landlords use paramilitary death squads. Many of the
> displaced-who now number between a million and a
> million and a half people-have gone to the edge of the
> rain forest where they usually clear between three and
> five hectares of land and grow coca leaf, the only crop
> that will allow them to survive.
>
> As Colombia's insurgent groups have pointed out, if the
> U.S. Empire wants to end the cultivation of coca leaves,
> the only way is to provide these marginalized peasants
> with a crop and a market which will enable them to feed
> their families. That requires either: (1) agricultural
> subsidies of the kind that have existed in the United
> States and Western Europe for decades but which are
> forbidden to the poorer nations of the world under the
> New World Order; or (2) the indexation of commodity
> prices, a demand made by the Non-Aligned Movement
> for years.
>
> If the claims of economic collapse are greatly
> exaggerated, at least by current Latin American
> standards, and the claims of a dramatic increase in coca
> leaf production are also greatly inflated, if not simply
> false, that would answer the assertion that a country is
> sinking into economic destitution at the same time that
> a principal export crop is off the charts.
>
> But it does not explain why the U.S. media have picked
> up on this line now. Usually, these stories of economic
> distress are the standard media fare for countries whose
> governments the U.S. is seeking to overthrow, such as
> Cuba, Sandinista Nicaragua, or Popular Unity Chile.
>
> Is the U.S. preparing to overthrow Pastrana or make
> him, Central American style, into a useless decoration on
> a military-death squad regime? What is certain is that
> the insistence by the U.S. government and imperial
> media on calling the FARC and ELN "narco-guerrillas" and
> "narco-terrorists" completely invalidates Pastrana's
> peace initiative.
>
> Pastrana has insisted that the guerrillas are nothing of
> the sort. The common agenda for peace talks, which he
> signed with the guerrillas last May, "implicitly recognizes
>
> that the revolutionaries took up arms in a just cause
> and commits both parties to negotiate profound
> economic and social reforms through political
> compromise," wrote former U.S. Ambassador to El
> Salvador, Robert White recently. (26) They include land
> reform, especially through confiscation and redistribution
> of huge land holdings obtained through drug profits, an
> end to the cultivation of illicit drugs, and a crackdown
> by the Colombian army on the paramilitary death
> squads.
>
> But U.S. officials have been heavily involved with
> forming the death squads since the beginning. Until
> Pastrana is able to make good on these last
> commitments, it is absurd to demand, as Washington
> has, that the rebels abandon their commitment to the
> peasants and labor organizers who depend on them, and
> leave them at the mercy of the paramilitary death
> squads.
>
> Footnotes
>
> 1. Agence France-Presse report, El Diario/La Prensa,
> June 30, 1999, p. 11.
>
> 2. Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering and drug
> czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey, Senate Foreign Relations
> Committee testimony, Oct. 6, 1999. Honduran military
> bases used in the Central American wars of the 1980s
> are ruled out because they are surrounded by mountains
> and lack sufficiently long runways for AWACs and other
> heavy aircraft.
>
> 3. "Despite their early hopes for Mr. Pastrana, however,
> United States officials generally describe his efforts to
> negotiate with the guerrillas as a failure that has left
> the insurgents stronger and more defiant," wrote the
> New York Times in a front-page story Sept. 15. It added
> that administration officials "say they have made it clear
> to the Colombians" that increased American support will
> come with pressure for "a new, probably tougher
> Government approach to the peace talks with the
> insurgents."
>
> 4. As noted in Human Rights Watch, "Human Rights
> Developments: Colombia," 1998.
>
> 5. Investors Business Daily, Aug. 25, 1999, p. 1.
>
> 6. Ibid.
>
> 7. "Colombia on the Brink," Foreign Affairs, Summer
> 1999, p. 17. As Human Rights Watch has noted, op. cit.,
> n. 4, although exact figures remained difficult to
> confirm, the Data Bank run by the Center for Research
> and Popular Education (Centro de Investigación y
> Educación Popular, CINEP) and the Intercongregational
> Commission of Justice and Peace (Justice and Peace),
> human rights groups, reported that of those killed for
> political reasons in 1998 where a perpetrator was
> suspected, 73 percent of the killings were attributed to
> paramilitaries, 17 percent were attributed to guerrillas,
> and 10 percent to state agents.
>
> 8. Quoted in Nick Trebat, "U.S. Policy Towards Colombia
> About To Massively Veer Off-Track: Drugs replace
> communism as the point of entry for U.S. policy on Latin
> America," Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Aug. 24, 1999.
>
> 9. "Guns, drugs and a slim chance for peace," Irish
> Times, July 13, 1999.
>
> 10. Robert E. White, "The Wrong War: Our Guns and
> Tanks Won't Bring An End to Colombia's Civil Strife,"
> Washington Post, Sept. 12, 1999, p. B1.
>
> 11. PBS Newshour, Sept. 22, 1999.
>
> 12. This was reminiscent of similar media stories in the
> 1980s extolling the U.S. formation from scratch of the
> Atlacatl Battalion in El Salvador, a military unit which it
>
> was asserted would have special human rights training
> that would gradually improve the behavior of the rest of
> the Salvadoran army. Atlacatl turned out to be
> responsible for the worst atrocities of the Salvador war.
> Apparently no one was surprised by this, for no serious
> U.S. media or congressional effort has ever been
> undertaken to establish how this could have happened.
>
> Years later, even after revelations of the Battalion's
> involvement in some of the worst atrocities of the war,
> from the El Mozote massacre at the beginning to the
> Jesuit murders at the end, the New York Times called it
> "the pride of the United States military team in San
> Salvador.... [T]rained in antiguerrilla operations, the
> battalion was intended to turn a losing war around."
> Clifford Krauss, "How U.S. Actions Helped Hide Salvador
> Human Rights Abuses," New York Times, Mar. 21, 1993,
> p. A1.
>
> 13. Although the spy plane was supposedly aimed at
> drug interdiction, it crashed an improbably long distance
> from where it was supposed to be operating. Weekly
> News Update on the Americas, July 25, 1999.
>
> 14. Stratfor Global Intelligence Update, June 10, 1999.
>
> 15. The effort to push through such a measure harkens
> back to 1979 when the Carter administration requested
> OAS backing for an invasion of Nicaragua, one month
> before the Sandinista triumph over the Somoza
> dictatorship. In an unprecedented show of
> independence, the OAS rejected the Carter proposal and
> accused the U.S. of interference. (Secretary of State
> Cyrus Vance had presented the proposal as a
> "peacekeeping force" aimed at preventing an imminent
> "humanitarian and political disaster" in Nicaragua.)
>
> 16. Op. cit., n. 4. The report listed the names of
> Colombian military units that form death squads and/or
> actively promote, support and take part in paramilitary
> activities. "These [units] make up over 75 percent of
> the Colombian army," it concludes.
>
> 17. An aide to Sen. Leahy reportedly told Tod Robberson
> of the Dallas Morning News that "previous Pentagon
> attempts to avoid applying those restrictions prompted
> Sen. Leahy earlier this month to draft legislation
> requiring compliance. Although the Defense Department
> has said it would agree to the proposed law, he said,
> the CIA rejects such restrictions." ("U.S. launches
> covert program to aid Colombia Military, mercenaries
> hired, sources say," Dallas Morning News, Aug. 19, 1998.
>
> 18. So do many of Burton's enterprises. Burton
> reportedly hands out copies of the memoirs of deposed
> Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza to Central
> American visitors to his office.
>
> 19. See New York Times, Sept. 15, 1999, p. A14. The
> $600 to $800 million figure is flatly contradicted by
> official U.S. findings, which claim that no more than $30
> to $100 million reaches guerrilla hands, largely through a
> war tax on peasants. Ibid. But even if the higher figures
> were true, U.S. officials also claim that at least $5
>billion
> in drug profits flow into Colombia every year. Who is
> receiving the rest?
>
> 20. Op. cit., n. 17.
>
> 21. "While fighting drugs will remain a central goal, the
> United States is about to make a broader commitment
> to support Colombia's embattled Government than it has
> in years." New York Times, Sept. 15, 1999, p. A1.
>
> 22. "Nor do those [U.S.] officials hide their view that
> Colombia's multiple crises may be beyond Mr. Pastrana's
> ability to resolve." New York Times, Sept. 15, 1999, p.
> A14.
>
> 23. Much of the U.S. administration's treatment of
> President Pastrana is disquietingly reminiscent of official
>
> U.S. reaction to President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon in
> 1963. U.S. officials learned in the autumn of that year
> that Diem was engaged in secret negotiations with
> Hanoi and the National Liberation Front to make South
> Vietnam neutral and to ask the Americans to leave.
> They immediately ordered the overthrow of Diem, whom
> they had installed as president of the U.S.-created
> republic, and his replacement with military rulers. Diem
> and his brother (who had been the go-between in the
> negotiations) were both murdered. Three weeks later, in
> a coincidence of timing that continues to interest
> historians, U.S. President John Kennedy was himself
> assassinated in Dallas. Diem was followed by a series of
> revolving-door military governments, many of them
> overthrown in turn when U.S. officials learned that they
> were engaged in peace negotiations.
>
> 24. AP dispatch, Hoy (New York), Oct. 14, 1999.
>
> 25. "Congressional Cowboys Shoot for Big, Bad War,"
> Colombia Bulletin, Summer 1999, p. 8.
>
> 26. Op. cit., n. 10.
>
>
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