HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- (Part 2) The Effects of Centuries of Austerity By the end of the 1990s, external debt had grown to five times what it had been in 1980 reaching $34.5 billion. Growth figures of -4.9% were the lowest of the century, unemployment was sky high, and almost 55 percent of Colombians lived in poverty.5 Colombia was in a serious recession. In December 1999, desperation provoked the government to accept, once again, reforms favorable to foreign investors in exchange for a $2.7 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. Colombian's economic problems, according to the IMF, were largely the result of unsustainable fiscal policies, principally, the large increases in public spending introduced in the early 1990s. The IMF-imposed remedy called for a severe reduction of public spending and the creation of new taxes. Consequently, salaries were to be reduced; the age of retirement raised; subsidies for public services cut; the official bank and the state-owned energy, mining and communications enterprises privatized; and massive dismissals in the public sector. In effect, the IMF was suggesting that Colombia was in the midst of an economic crisis because it had been too generous with its citizens. It is interesting to note what the increased government revenue (and the shirts taken from the peasants' backs) is going to pay for. According to the IMF, the goal is to "exert a strict control over all expenditure other than interest payments."6 In other words, the IMF wants the Colombian government to take money from its already brutalized population and deposit it directly into the purses of rich lender nations. According to Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Stanford University and the former chief economist at the World Bank: "Today, the mandate [of the IMF] often appears to be that of a bill collector for lending nations: its objective is to make sure that the debtor country has as large a war chest as possible to repay outstanding loans."7 This relationship is quite apparent in Colombia. In 1998, even before officially accepting the IMF loan conditions, Colombia paid close to $4.6 billion in debt services (interest and repayments). This was equivalent to three times the entire healthcare budget and more than the total sum spent on education. In 2000, after the implementation of IMF policies, debt servicing increased by 20 percent. In 2001, this figure grew again by almost 30 percent. In fact, 86 percent of tax income is now being used to pay debt services.8 Debt service payments have been financed through falling real wages, as well as by state cutbacks in healthcare, education, and public employment. It is not surprising that the number of dissidents in Colombian society has increased. Even during negotiations for the IMF bail out there were massive demonstrations in the cities. In the past year, unions, public employees, students, human rights groups and other non-governmental organizations have taken to the streets demanding decent wages; the right to health, employment and education; an end to privatization and austerity; and a moratorium on debt payments (see, Colombians protest IMF-Imposed Austerity Measures). When a hospital in San Juan de Dios was forced to shut down because it could not afford to pay its electricity bill, doctors and nurses throughout Colombia threatened to call a nationwide strike. In the cities, the government, the elites, multinational corporations, and their hired killers have responded with more death; targeting union leaders, journalists, human rights activists, and political challengers. Meanwhile, in vast expanses of the countryside there are still no roads, no schools, no hospitals and 85 percent of the rural population lives in poverty. Liberalization, privatization, and related violence have undermined subsistence and pushed many peasants off their lands. The displaced move deeper into the jungle where coca--because it grows in poor soil, provides bountiful yields, and can be easily transported--is the only economically viable crop. In order to survive, peasants must function outside the channels regulated by neoliberal policies. As a result, some of the profits from coca cultivation find their way back to the peasant producer (see, The Plight of the Peasant Coca Grower). In these areas--historically neglected or abused by the government--the guerrillas provision justice. By taxing the drug trade, the guerrillas build infrastructure and fund schools and medical clinics. They also enact violent land and wealth redistribution by murdering and kidnapping large landowners and business executives, while bombing oil pipelines owned by elite and foreign interests. Also, the level of rural violence escalates as wealthy landowners, cattle ranchers, industrialists, and right-wing political and business interests respond to the guerrilla threat by increasing funding for their private armies. Throughout Colombia, poverty and the demand for violence fuel the supply of killers. Enjoying lavish funding from elite elements of Colombian society, the paramilitaries are extremely successful in recruiting the poor and unemployed. They offer new recruits a cellular phone, a gun and $250 per month.9 And as poverty and unemployment increase, working as a professional criminal becomes more attractive, especially in a country whose citizens consider it too dangerous or futile to report criminals to the authorities. Plan Colombia: Ensuring Access to Resources On January 11, 2000, President Clinton announced a $1.3 billion aid package for Colombia to "assist in vital counter-drug efforts aimed at keeping illegal drugs off our shores" and to "help Colombia promote peace and prosperity and deepen its democracy" (see, Plan Colombia: A Closer Look) By now it is common knowledge that the illicit crop eradication tactics currently being employed as part of Plan Colombia--aerial fumigation of coca and poppy plants--have not and will not stop the flow of drugs into the United States (see, The Drug War: An Exercise in Futility). In 1994, a Rand study found that treatment was seven times more cost-effective than policing and 23 times more cost-effective than source country interdiction.10 The forced crop eradication sponsored by Plan Colombia will merely result in what's become known as "the balloon effect": when pressure is applied in one area, cultivation simply shifts to another. This was evidenced by the supposedly successful coca eradication campaigns in Peru and Bolivia, which were immediately followed by a coca boom in Colombia (see, The Failure of Coca Eradication in Peru and Bolivia). According to William M. LeoGrande, a professor of government at American University, and Kenneth Sharpe, a professor of political science at Swarthmore College, "You can't use military force to repeal the laws of economics."11 The chemicals being used to destroy coca crops are also effective in destroying licit crops, while causing environmental damage and health problems (see, Death Falls from the Sky). Since coca grows well in many climates, including the jungle, and is the most lucrative cash crop available in the Andean region, desperate peasants displaced from land contaminated by herbicides are more likely to clear another section of rainforest to produce coca than any other crop. Furthermore, the proposed areas of fumigation do not correspond to all the areas of heavy coca production. Fumigation has largely bypassed paramilitary-controlled coca plantations even though the connections between the paramilitaries and the international traffickers are far more extensive than the simple taxation relationship shown to exist between the guerrillas and the traffickers. Taking for granted that the authors of Plan Colombia are not blundering idiots, one must assume there is a hidden motivation underlying the drug war campaign. The United States is the world's largest consumer of petroleum and access to reliable and inexpensive supplies has always been a principle foreign policy concern. The loss of the Panama Canal and the anti-imperialist attitudes of Hugo Chavez--the nationalist leader of Venezuela, the single largest supplier of oil to the United States--as well as his sympathies for the Colombian guerillas and socialist Cuba spell trouble for U.S. oil interests (see, The Chavez Factor). Despite Colombia's status as the second most dangerous country in the world in which to conduct oil exploration, when its largest oil discovery since the 1980s was announced last June, several companies, including Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum (Oxy), seized the opportunity to increase their investment in Colombia. However, National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas responded by launching a new campaign of kidnappings and pipeline bombings to protest the overgenerous concessions made to foreign corporations. Last year, the Cano Limon pipeline was bombed 76 times and was forced to temporarily shut down. Consequently, oil companies need Washington's help. Because of the violence, only 20 percent of Colombia's potential oil producing territory has been explored; clearly there are profits to be made. Therefore, it is not surprising that Oxy's Vice-President of Public Affairs, Lawrence P. Meriage, joined other representatives of corporate America in lobbying for congressional support of the military and "counter-narcotics" components of Plan Colombia. In a speech to the House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, Meriage also pushed for an extension of military operations to oil-rich regions in northern Colombia to "augment security for new oil development".12 The promotion of peace, prosperity and democracy also seems to be largely a pretext. While the 80 percent of the budget allocated to military hardware was distributed immediately, the $15 million promised to alternative crop development and social programs such as refugee assistance, human rights, improved law enforcement, and judicial reform has yet to arrive. Meanwhile, the Leahy Amendment, which makes U.S. aid contingent on human rights conditions, was simply waived by then-President Clinton in the name of U.S. "national security interests." It is evident by past drug war policy that promoting human rights is of little concern to Washington. In 1990, at the same time President George Bush began funneling aid to the Colombian Armed Forces (and by extension, the paramilitaries) to fight the "war on drugs", the Andean Commission of Jurists reported that the Colombian military was using anti-drug measures as a pretext to arrest and murder union leaders, grassroots organizers, and members of opposition political parties. Over the past decade, the Colombian military has the worst human rights record in the hemisphere. In response to human rights groups and a handful of U.S. lawmakers, Washington has pushed Colombia to clean up its image, crack down on corruption, and do a better job disguising the exploitation and murder of its own citizens. In order to hide its continuing involvement in human rights abuses, the Colombian army now "outsources" the violence to the privately (as opposed to publicly) run paramilitary death squads. The continuing intimate relationship between the military and the paramilitaries has been well documented by reputable human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Even Colombia's mainstream media--owned almost entirely by the political and economic oligarchy, including the families of President Andres Pastrana and Finance Minister Juan Manuel Santos--must concede that the paramilitaries are now responsible for 80 percent of Colombia's violent deaths. Plan Colombia: A Convergence of Corporate Interests "The fundamental principles of American foreign policy, as they were articulated quite clearly in the 1940s, are designed to ensure what George Kennan once called the 'protection of our raw materials'….The problem is that the indigenous [and domestic] populations often have the tendency to try to use "our raw materials" for their own purposes." Noam Chomsky, Latin America: From Colonization To Globalization In September 2000, a former U.S. Special Forces intelligence agent claimed that the purpose of Plan Colombia was to defend the operations of Occidental, BP-Amoco and Texas Petroleum, while securing access to potentially rich, but still unexplored, Colombian oil fields. If this is true, then the Plan was well designed. Not only is the flow of U.S. aid oblivious to human rights abuses, but there also seems to be a correlation between the two. Corporations lobby to increase aid to the very entities that abuse human rights. It is quite telling that the paramilitaries' political stance is in outright support of IMF-imposed privatization programs and other economic reforms that generate profit for multinational corporations. Even if it is not an effective way of countering the drug trade, funding paramilitary forces is a very efficient means of solving conflicts over valuable resources. And while fumigation is also not an effective strategy for waging war against drugs, it is a highly efficient method of clearing populations from areas rich in resources and of eliminating opposition. Fumigation forces peasants to abandon land that then becomes available for multinational speculation. The departments of Putumayo and Bolivar, both primary targets of Plan Colombia's aerial fumigation campaign, have large, and still unexplored, mineral and oil deposits. Not surprisingly, Occidental and British Petroleum were fervent supporters of the U.S. aid package. Occidental spent $350,000 in the U.S. Congress ensuring that the U.S. contribution to Plan Colombia was passed. The oil industry was responsible for almost 20 percent of President George W. Bush's campaign funding, while also donating large sums of money to former Vice-President Gore's campaign (see, The Well-Oiled Presidential Campaigns). Other multinationals also rallied in support of the aid package. In fact, most of the $1.3 billion has been deposited into the bank accounts of U.S. defense contractors. Connecticut-based United Technologies Corporation is building 30 Blackhawk helicopters at $12.8 million a piece. It is no surprise that Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut was a strong supporter of the aid package. Another benefactor is Texas-based Textron, which is upgrading 33 Vietnam-era Huey helicopters at a cost of $1.8 million each. While Lockheed Martin received $68 million for the manufacture of early warning radar systems (see, U.S. Aid Package Amounts to Corporate Welfare). Meanwhile, Monsanto and Dupont, manufacturers of the fumigation chemicals being sprayed on Colombian peasants, deposited some $600,000 into political coffers during the time the aid bill was being debated in Congress.13 The U.S. aid package and Plan Colombia effectively support the interests of multinational corporations by funding arms contractors, manufacturers of deadly chemicals, and private death squads, each of which will be deployed on Colombian soil to silence or kill those who oppose the interests of U.S. corporations. The drug war and Neoliberalism go hand in hand: their goal is the protection of "our raw materials". Neoliberalism provides the rationale and a framework for opening up the Colombian economy to foreign exploitation, while the U.S. aid package provides the hardware to enforce the exploitation when the population refuses to passively accept it. Colombia and the Free
Trade Area "The people who try to impose the principles of neoliberalism in the Third World and in the slums of our cities don't want the same principles for themselves... They want a powerful nanny state to protect them, as always." Noam Chomsky, Latin America: From Colonization to Globalization Amidst popular protest, negotiations continue for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which will extend the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) throughout the hemisphere in 2005. In Mexico, since the passage of NAFTA, eight million more families have fallen into poverty, one million more Mexicans work for less than the minimum wage ($3.40 per day), and approximately 28,000 small businesses have shut down due to the influx of foreign corporations. The FTAA would spread and enhance this horror story by demanding that regulations placed on multinational operations throughout the hemisphere be eliminated to allow more profit to flow from the South to the North. Hemispheric competition for foreign investment will attain a whole new level of ferocity as governments lower labor, human rights, and environmental standards in order to offer attractive profit margins. In Colombia, competition for foreign investment has already made labor unions and their leaders prime targets for violence. According to Liam Craig-Best, a human rights activist who works closely with leaders of Colombia's largest union, Unified Workers Central, (CUT), Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world for union members. Last year 129 unionists were killed, while this year 44 members have already been murdered for standing up for labor rights.14 The FTAA will add more fuel to the fire that is already consuming, at a massive rate, those who try to put human life before corporate profit. Furthermore, the FTAA will increase unregulated foreign investment, which will result in more rural peasants being displaced by paramilitaries seeking to gain control of lands sought after by foreign corporations. On the environmental front, the FTAA will enhance the degradation that has already taken a huge toll on the stability of Colombian society. Hundreds of pipeline bombings have poured many times the amount of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez into the fragile Colombian ecosystem. Meanwhile, the fumigation and violence have pushed almost two million people off the most productive tracts of land in the country. Many of these displaced have moved deeper into the rainforest where their only viable means of survival is coca cultivation, which further devastates the environment and increases the flow of drugs to U.S. and European markets. In other areas, FTAA agreements, like IMF loan conditions, include commitments to liberalize trade and privatize state-owned entities such as education, health care, social security, and public utilities. Once again, freedom for corporations will mean reduced access to basic survival necessities for many Colombians who will be unable to afford the higher prices for food, water, electricity, healthcare and education. New regulations surrounding intellectual property rights will allow
pharmaceutical corporations to patent their marketing rights across the entire
hemisphere in order to keep drug prices high and impede the domestic production
of generic versions of life saving drugs. Those who are unable to pay will
suffer and die. What the FTAA amounts to is protectionism: legal protection for the "rights" of multinational corporations to exploit for profit. It is no coincidence that the FTAA agreement has been negotiated behind closed doors and that, although more than 500 corporations have been given the security clearances required to review the FTAA documents, no labor, human rights or environmental groups have been permitted to monitor or participate in the proceedings. The FTAA agreements will expand and protect corporate freedom by imposing an immense burden on the already overworked, underpaid, and under nourished peoples of Colombia. As the injustices grow, so will resentment and the violence (see, Colombians Protest Fumigation and Globalization). Although the corporations operating in Colombia will benefit in the short-term through the removal of social and environmental impediments to profit maximization; in the long-term, rising violence will result in an increasingly unstable investment climate. The freedom to displace, impoverish, and brutalize the Colombian population while exploiting the country's resources will force more and more peasants to take up arms or turn to the drug trade for survival. An Alternative Vision of Freedom and Globalization Exploitative relations of exchange have thus far dominated the globalization process. Enforcing freedom for some has clamped shackles on others. And while for some the possibilities for growth have become limitless, for the majority, growth is increasingly restricted. The neoliberal policy makers have actively enforced this inequality by playing on a prevalent misunderstanding of the relationship between rights and duties. The freedom of demand is not benign, but malignant, and shantytowns, violence, and misery are the tumors of the unrestricted drives for profit made possible by the current global system. However, this track of development is not inevitable. More than 50 years ago, in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, developed and developing nations joined together to form the United Nations. The UN's charter was, and still is, based on an alternative conceptualization of the interplay between rights and duties, between freedom and responsibility. This understanding suggests that global well-being is not best attained through the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest. In order to prevent, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it, the national conditions that lead to military governments and eventually world wars, certain affairs need to be regulated by international human rights norms. It was understood that there needed to be a bottom line that would protect, not the fundamental rights of states or markets, both intangible entities, but the fundamental rights of human beings. In the name of state rights, or market rights, the powerful justify taking more than they give. However, as globalization increases commonalities, those denied their freedom, those with many duties and few rights, become more numerous and increasingly aware of the ways in which their struggles are united. This process is already under way as many organizations in developed and developing nations have united in a globalized grassroots movement to combat corporate-sponsored neoliberal globalization. Environmental degradation has raised the issues of globalization and social responsibility to a new level of consciousness. The linkages connecting the well-being of citizens across the globe have moved beyond the theoretical realm into tangible existence. Consequently, post World War II globalization provides the world with a renewed opportunity for awareness. There must be a bottom line. Entities that produce systematic misery and death cannot be justified or protected in the name of abstract concepts. Morality must not be forfeited for either the state or the market. In both Bogota and Washington, direct human rights abuses have been justified in the name of "national security", while policies supporting the "inevitable" economic process of neoliberal globalization have institutionalized gross levels of poverty and inequality. IMF-imposed reforms, the drug war, Plan Colombia, and the FTAA forfeit basic and necessary standards of morality by failing to make economic and political rights contingent upon the duty to ensure fundamental human rights. Our well-being is united by global systems and our rights are contingent upon our duties. The consequences of failing to fulfill those duties are clearly evident in the words of Holocaust survivor Pastor Martin Neimoller:
Report prepared by Anne Montgomery of the Information Network of the Americas (INOTA), September 2001.
Notes 1. A. Shepherd, "The Rich Poor Gap Grows," ABC News, August 1, 1999, ABC News Internet Ventures, Online 2. Jorge Ramirez Ocampo, "The Colombian Apertura: An assessment," Colombia: The Politics of Reforming the State, Ed. Eduardo Posada-Carbo (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), p. 193 4. Garry M. Leech, "Colombians Protest IMF- Imposed Austerity Measures," Colombia Report, August 6, 2000, The Information Network of the Americas, Online 5. Cited in Alberto Yepes P., "Colombia. Who Benefits from Adjustment, War, and the Free Market?" Social Watch, 2001, Third World Institute, Online 6. Cited in Alberto Yepes P., "Colombia. Who Benefits from Adjustment, War, and the Free Market?" Social Watch, 2001, Third World Institute, Online 7. Joseph Stiglitz, "The Failure of the Fund: Rethinking the IMF Response," Harvard International Review, Summer 2001, p. 16 8. Cited in Alberto Yepes P., "Colombia. Who Benefits from Adjustment, War, and the Free Market?" Social Watch, 2001, Third World Institute, Online 9. Scott Wilson, "Colombia Right's 'Cleaning' Campaign," Washington Post Foreign Service, April 17, 2001, The Washington Post Company, Online 10. C. Peter Rydell and Susan S. Everingham, "Controlling Cocaine: Supply Versus Demand Programs," RAND, 1994, The RAND Corporation, Online 11. William M. LeoGrande and Kenneth Sharpe, "A Plan, But No Clear Objective. General Powell to Secretary Powell: We Need to Talk Colombia", Washington Post, April 1, 2001, The Washington Post Company, Online 12. Colombian Project, "Testimony of Lawrence P. Meriage before the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources," Center for International Policy, February 15, 2000, Online 13. Liam Craig-Best and Rowan Shingler, "Fumigation: An Attack on the Ecology and People of Colombia," Spectrazine, June 7, 2001, Online 14. Liam Craig-Best, interview with the author, August 23, 2001 15. Jewish Virtual Library, "Martin Neimoeller: The Failure to Speak Up Against the Nazis," 2001, The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, Online Report prepared by Anne Montgomery of the Information Network of the Americas (INOTA), September 2001. ------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^==^============================================================= This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.bacIlu Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^==^============================================================= |
