(My
entire hostel in Cartegena was woken up and all the rooms were
systematically searched on the morning of the weekend that Bush visited
Uribe in Cartegena last month. Snipers patrolled the rooftops and
police and military (readily equipped with riot gear) were also
stationed in small groups on all four corners of every block. Persons
carrying any sort of bag or backpack on the street were subject to any
number of searches without explanation or question.)
My dinner conversation last night was centered around the comment and question;
"Interesting
how easily and eagerly the US Government extended to us (Colombia), and
even dipped into "emergency aid" funds to offer, an assistance package
of 1.3 Billion dollars. Perhaps Asia would have gotten more than 15
million dollars in help if they´d asked for it in guns and helicopters
instead of rice and water?"
Perhaps.
In any case, I went
online to think the question out (of US "aid" and intervention in
Colombia) and decided to share what I spent my entire afternoon
reading...
(I obviously do not support all the statements and
opinions made in the following articles, but I did find them extremely
interesting, and in alignment with I've personally seen in Colombia and
heard from the Colombians I know.)
*****
The Environment, Plan Columbia, and U.S. Aid
by Kristine A. Herwig
Colombia,
which is roughly the size of Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma combined,
supplies the U.S with as much as ninety percent of its cocaine and
seventy percent of its heroin (Rosenberg 51). The U.S. has been
involved in spraying herbicides on drug crops for nearly a decade in
Colombia, but since 1995 production has doubled and a country known for
its extreme violence and dismal human rights record has seen both
escalate to even higher levels, implying that U.S. efforts thus far
have had no success (Rohter). Because of this, in 1998 Colombian
President Pastrana sought help from the Clinton administration to seek
aid in reducing drug trafficking, negotiating peace with the
guerrillas, and investing in development programs to wean peasants away
from growing coca and heroin poppy (Bald). What was born in 2000,
however, bore little resemblance to what Pastrana had originally
proposed as Plan Colombia. The Clinton administration had given Plan
Colombia a very different face that involved a military component of
nearly $800 million dollars, 80% of the total 1.3 billion dollars being
offered (Rosenberg 51). This military aid, however, may offer little
chance of reducing the production of cocaine and heroin and is ?likely
to make things worse ? to widen the war, handicap the peace talks
between the government and the rebel groups, embolden the hard-liners
and cause more civilian death? (Ibid.).
< Read More
*****
On Colombia
by Noam Chomsky
There
is nothing particularly novel about the relation between atrocious
human rights violations and US aid. On the contrary, it is a rather
consistent correlation. The leading US academic specialist on human
rights in Latin America, Lars Schoultz, found in a 1981 study that US
aid "has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American
governments which torture their citizens,... to the hemisphere's
relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights." That
includes military aid, is independent of need, and runs through the
Carter period. In another academic study, Latin Americanist Martha
Huggins reviewed data for Latin America suggesting that ?the more
foreign police aid given [by the US], the more brutal and less
democratic the police institutions and their governments become.?
Economist Edward Herman found the same correlation between US military
aid and state terror worldwide, but also carried out another study that
gave a plausible explanation. US aid, he found, correlated closely with
improvement in the climate for business operations, as one would
expect. And in US dependencies it turns out with fair regularity, and
for understandable reasons, that the climate for profitable investment
and other business operations is improved by killing union activists,
torture and murder of peasants, assassination of priests and human
rights activists, and so on. There is, then, a secondary correlation
between US aid and egregious human rights violations.
< Read More
*****
Why Say No to FTAA
by Jorge Robledo
For
those Colombians who don't want to deceive themselves, what the U.S. is
seeking with ?free trade? has been explained with exceptional frankness
by its strategists. Thus, according to Robert Zoellick, (U.S. Trade
Representative in the negotiations), the "FTAA will help open Latin
American and Caribbean markets to U.S. businesses and farmers by
eliminating barriers to trade, investment, and services, and by
reducing tariffs on U.S. exports which are much higher in these markets
than those applied by the United States.? And the Secretary of State,
Colin Powell, stated: ?Our objective with FTAA is to guarantee North
American companies the control of a territory that goes from the Arctic
Pole all the way to Antarctica, free access to the whole hemisphere
without difficulties or obstacles for our products, services,
technology, and capital.?
Thus, not unexpectedly, the decision
to create the FTAA was made in 1994 by the only one in a position to
make it, then President George H. Bush, a man loyal to a Henry
Kissinger dictum that is truer in the Americas than anywhere else:
?Globalization is nothing but a euphemism for American domination." And
the Colombian government pledged to join such agreement without
consulting Colombia's people and without any analysis of its
consequences.
< Read More
*****
Colombia: Another U.S.-Sponsored Killing Field
(An interview with Doug Morris, Co-director of the David Anderson Center for Peace and Justice)
Put
simply the U.S. wants a system dominated by elites who support U.S.
wealth and power interests, so that U.S. businesses will be given free
access to Colombian resources -- material and human -- particularly oil
resources, but not limited to oil. Apparently Colombia has the largest
oil reserves in the hemisphere.
There is a systematic history of
the U.S. destroying independent alternative social movements when those
movements represent the interests of the "wrong" people, namely, the
poor, the peasants, indigenous people, working people, etc. It is the
threat of "people taking matters into their own hands," as Kennedy
officials put it in discussing the real threat in Cuba. The point is
the U.S. will not allow a successful alternative to develop and that is
a real crime against all of humanity. This "monotheistic" approach,
where "Profits over people" is the state religion which allows no
alternative, is making conditions increasingly worse for people and the
environment.
Given our enormous wealth and resources we should
be funding experiments in alternative social, economic and political
organization, not destroying them. This "monotheistic" approach, for
most of the people of the world, is a grotesque catastrophe. Corporate
rights should not come before human rights.
So, to sum up in
answer to your question, the U.S. goal is to create conditions of
"stability" in Colombia. Conditions are "stable" after people are
forced, often through brutal repression and murder, to passively accept
whatever the United States is imposing on them, in this case
neo-liberal structural adjustment programs and austerity programs,
often called the "Washington Consensus," i.e. "good for corporations,
bad for people," which put corporate rights and profits above all else.
Conditions are "unstable" when people are actively resisting
U.S.-imposed programs. The FARC resistance movement are not angels,
they kidnap, they "tax" businesses, including coca growers, they
murder, though nowhere near the rate of the paramilitaries and
military, but all of that must be seen in the context of Colombia's
real problems.
< Read More
