Fw: Bush's dirty war in Colombia

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg at tin.it>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jim Jaszewski" <grok at sprint.ca>
Subject: Fwd: Bush's dirty war in Colombia


 
 
 Bush's dirty war
 Colombia's peasant farmers are being driven off their
 land. And we are helping
 
 
 George Monbiot
 Tuesday May 22, 2001
 The Guardian

 George Bush has made no secret of the primary mission
 of his presidency: to remunerate the companies which
 supported his bid for power. To the oil industry he
 has given the Arctic wildlife reserve and the
 abandonment of American action on climate change. To
 the tobacco industry he has granted an end to the
 federal lawsuits on behalf of the victims of smoking.
 To the mining firms he has pledged to remove the laws
 restricting arsenic in drinking water.
 
 But what do you give to the industry which has
 everything? Which already receives some $200bn a year
 from the US taxpayer? You give America's arms
 companies what they most desire. You give them war.
 
 To this end, and in the name of national security, Mr
 Bush has been seeking to revive the hostility and
 suspicion which proved so lucrative until the
 disastrous events of 1989. He hopes to scrap the
 anti-ballistic missile treaty, destabilising the
 world's nuclear equilibrium. He is determined to
 extend Nato to all of Russia's western borders,
 causing the moribund but dangerous old bear to feel
 more threatened than it has done for a decade.
 
 Welcome as these incipient crises are, however, the
 war industry also requires immediate conflict. So the
 US has been seeking opportunities all over the world.
 None has so far proved as fruitful as its support for
 a scheme devised by the government of Colombia.
 
 The purpose of Plan Colombia, according to President
 Andres Pastrana, is to help eliminate the production
 of drugs, generate employment, boost trade and bring
 peace to a country which has been mauled by civil war
 for more than 50 years. The Clinton and Bush
 administrations have generously supplied this worthy
 scheme with $1.3bn, promising the American people that
 the money will be spent to assist the war on drugs.
 Eighty-four per cent of the funding will take the form
 of military aid.
 
 To control drugs, the US insists, first it must
 control the country. To this end, it has supplied 104
 combat helicopters and trained three Colombian army
 battalions. But the army is not exactly the instrument
 of peace that Mr Pastrana has claimed. As Amnesty
 International has recorded: "Colombian army personnel,
 trained by US special forces, have been implicated...
 in serious human rights violations, including the
 massacre of civilians."
 
 The army works alongside Colombia's ultra-right
 paramilitaries, who are responsible for the
 assassination of thousands of trades union and peasant
 leaders and the displacement of hundreds of thousands
 of people from their homes. As one of Colombia's
 official human rights ombudsmen has noted: "The
 paramilitary phenomenon... is the spearhead of Plan
 Colombia: to create territorial control and to control
 the civilian population. This is a terror tactic." The
 US, with the help of the Colombian government, is
 waging yet another dirty war in Latin America.
 
 Far from eliminating drugs production, this war will
 only make it worse. Plan Colombia funds the aerial
 spraying of coca and opium fields with Roundup, the
 broad-spectrum herbicide patented by Monsanto. Roundup
 destroys almost everything it touches, wiping out
 legal crops alongside illegal ones, poisoning rivers,
 shattering one of the most fragile and biodiverse
 forest ecosystems on Earth, precipitating both acute
 and chronic human diseases. It is the Agent Orange of
 America's new Vietnam. (Agent Orange, interestingly,
 was also a Monsanto product.) Now the US
 administration wants to take this ecocide a step
 further, by spraying the jungle with a genetically
 engineered fungus which produces deadly toxins.
 
 When their livelihood has been destroyed, the peasant
 farmers and indigenous people have no means of
 survival but to flee further into the jungle and start
 growing drugs. Since the aerial spraying programme
 began, the area devoted to drugs cultivation in
 Colombia has tripled.
 
 But Plan Colombia is not a war against drugs: it is a
 war against people. Its ultimate purpose, as several
 international observers have pointed out, is to
 eliminate both leftwing guerrillas and grassroots
 democratic movements, in order to facilitate the
 seizure of the country's most valuable land. The US
 envisages a new inter-oceanic canal through the north
 of the country, to bypass the congested Panama canal.
 Its companies have identified billions of dollars'
 worth of oil and mineral deposits. So, for the past
 five months, soldiers and paramilitaries have been
 murdering community leaders and expelling local
 people. The places identified for economic development
 by Plan Colombia are the places now being savaged by
 the paramilitaries.
 
 The European Union is well aware of these atrocities
 and of their coordination by President Pastrana's
 plan. At first sight, it appears to be contesting
 them. At a meeting on April 30, the EU resolved to
 spend 330m euros on "political support" for the "peace
 process" in Colombia. The money will be used to
 establish "peace laboratories", contest human rights
 violations and "relieve the social impact of
 conflict". The package looks uncontroversial and it
 received no significant coverage.
 
 But the public statements issued by the EU, the
 European commission and Chris Patten, the British
 commissioner who brokered the agreement, contain a
 number of curious omissions. "Plan Colombia" is
 mentioned nowhere. Nor is the US government. Nor are
 the atrocities committed by the army and coordinated
 by the state. The killings in the country are blamed
 solely upon paramilitaries and guerrillas.
 
 Only when you read an account of the same meeting by
 the Inter-American Development Bank do you stumble
 across several interesting features missing from the
 European statements. The first is that the funding
 package is not a European initiative, but was provided
 at the request of the Colombian government. The second
 is that it will be supplemented by extra money from
 the US. The third is that Marc Grossman, a US under
 secretary of state, was sitting in the meeting.
 
 Trawl the European commission's archive, and you
 discover a further interesting feature: that the
 "peace process" to which the EU was referring is none
 other than Plan Colombia. The new funding represents
 the plan's "social component", attached to the US
 invasion in the hope of making it look like something
 rather different. Spain is prepared to go further
 still, and help the US to finance the Colombian army.
 
 The new European funding, in other words, provides the
 political credibility which President Pastrana and the
 US administration have desperately been seeking ever
 since they initiated their plan. Wittingly or
 otherwise, the European Union has helped the two
 governments to disguise a programme of state terror as
 humanitarian aid.
 
 Mass killings, ecocide and the seizure of resources do
 not have a financial solution, but a political one.
 You cannot buy human rights, least of all from a
 scheme that's responsible for their abuse. The only
 help foreign intervention can offer the Colombian
 people is intense diplomatic pressure, exposing the
 atrocities of their government and army, denouncing
 the scheme which coordinates them and isolating its
 supporters. Instead, we have chosen to collaborate.
 
 At its best, the EU's funding is a waste of money. At
 its worst, it amounts to complicity in crimes against
 humanity. How many of us would have agreed that our
 money should be used like this?