Colombia: Three Simple Questions

What are we doing in Colombia?

On August 15, a group of Colombian school children was hiking through a coffee field on a field trip when soldiers opened fire, killing six of the children aged eight to ten. Army commanders blamed Colombian guerrillas for the incident, stating that the rebels use children as human shields. The New York Times reported on 8/19/00 that several witnesses said there were no guerrillas anywhere in the area.

Just two weeks later, President Bill Clinton went to Colombia to hand a $1.3 billion aid package to President Andres Pastrana. Over 80 percent of this money is destined for military and police aid. President Clinton could have withheld the aid because of human rights violations committed by the Colombian army, which did not come close to meeting the human rights conditions included by Congress in the aid package. Instead he chose to ignore the petition of human rights groups to hold up the aid and used a loophole in the law, a "national security" waiver, to push the aid through. He handed the Colombian army over two million dollars a day to spend. In Colombia, we are repeating past mistakes on a gargantuan scale. At the height of the 1980s civil war in El Salvador, the U.S. spent over one million dollars a day in military aid. Seventy thousand people died before U.S. foreign policy?makers decided it was smarter and cheaper to support a peace process than to send guns, helicopters and CIA agents. Military aid became funding to strengthen the justice system and to support civilian actors. El Salvador is still poor, but former military enemies now participate in open elections and the guerrillas laid down their weapons to form a political party.

Colombia is the size of all seven Central American countries combined, plus four more El Salvadors. It has a population of over 38 million. It is a wealthy country, a major trade partner and the United States' seventh largest supplier of oil. It is also a country where the distribution of wealth is extremely skewed.

The guerrillas and army have been fighting in Colombia for nearly 40 years, and there is an ongoing peace process. But we seem to have forgotten the foreign policy lessons learned so recently in Central America. On October 24, 1999, nearly 12 million Colombians marched in the streets to demand peace. Instead of supporting them, U.S. military aid means we are supporting one side of the conflict -- an army that human rights groups describe as the worst human rights violator in the hemisphere.

Root causes of a conflict

The Colombian guerrillas are not like the Central American revolutionaries. They do not enjoy the popular support of the FMLN in El Salvador or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua because of their propensity for human rights abuses, kidnapping and profitting from drugs. Recent polls in Colombiaput support around five percent. Their possibilities for doing anything beyond fighting seem remote.

Yet they picked up guns 40 years ago for the same reasons that drove Salvadorans and Nicaraguans into the mountainsn -- political exclusion and injustice. Colombian politics have been historically dominated by two parties that differ little in program, but have spent decades killing each other over personal power. And there has been no room for other opinions or opposition parties. Between 1948 and 1965, the two parties started slaughtering each other wholesale, in a period Colombians refer to as "La Violencia" (the violence). Over 200,000 died. The Colombian guerrillas began their struggle in this context. Political participation was not a real option.

In the 1980s, the Colombian guerrillas decided to try peaceful political participation. Along with progressive activists, some guerrillas formed the Patriotic Union Party. By the 1990s, over 2,500 party candidates and activists had been assassinated. In 1999, more than 3,500 people were the targets of political violence and either disappeared, were kidnapped, tortured and/or murdered, according to Amnesty International. The numbers are running even higher this year. Political participation and free speech are still a pipe dream in Colombia today. With military aid, we are ignoring the root causes of the conflict and fueling the war.

Why are we doing this?

The justification for U.S. policy towards Colombia is the drug war -- to stop the flow of cocaine and heroine into the United States at its source. In South American countries, drug cultivation is the direct result of poverty. Colombia expert Adam Isacson of the Center for International Policy writes that in the 1960s and 70s in Colombia, political violence and a need for land pushed tens of thousands of small farmers into southern Colombia, a remote and neglected region the size of California. The state had virtually no presence there, and small landholders were left to fend for themselves, without basic services, credit, roads or rule of law. The new residents could not make a living on traditional crops like yucca and rubber because the cost of taking their products to market was greater than the profit. By the 1980s, many discovered they could get a much better price for coca.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and with it Washington's obsession over a communist threat. That same year, the National Defense Authorization Act made the Pentagon the "single lead agency" for the detection and monitoring of drug shipments into the United States. President George Bush initiated a $2.2 billion dollar, five year plan to stop the cocaine trade at its source. Fighting drugs at home became a military matter, and former Cold Warriors became cocaine warriors.

Throughout the 1990s in South America, thousands of U.S. military personnel operated ground?based radar, flew monitoring aircraft, and provided support and training to the Andean armies. But by the end of the decade, Colombia had become the world's largest cocaine producer. "...despite two years of extensive herbicide spraying, U.S. estimates show there has not been any net reduction in coca cultivation??net coca cultivation actually increased 50 percent," the Government Accounting Office (GAO) reported in July 1999.

A landmark study by the RAND Corporation compared the cost efficiency of spending money at home rather than abroad to fight the drug war. Rand reported that dollar for dollar, drug treatment at home is 10 times more effective than interdiction abroad and 23 times more effective than eradicating coca at its source. The same study found that in order to reduce cocaine consumption in the U.S. by just one percent, $783 million had to be spent in the source country, or $366 million on international interdiction, or $246 million on domestic law enforcement, or just $34 million on drug treatment in the United States.

Policy-makers say the guerrillas are involved in the drug trade. The rebels do earn considerable income from taxing coca growers in their zones of control just as they tax all businesses in their area, legitimate or otherwise. But the guerrillas are at the lowest end of the cocaine chain. The real money is in international trafficking and members of the Colombian army and paramilitary groups have been caught red-handed, according to local and international press, and the Drug Enforcement Agency's own reports.

The drug trade permeates Colombian society. No matter how much money Washington pours into this war, it will be hard to stamp out. But the place to start might be our own embassy in Bogotá. In 1999, the wife of Col. James Hiett, in charge of the U.S. army's anti-drug operation in Colombia, was convicted to five years in a federal prison for smuggling half a million dollars worth of cocaine and heroin into the United States, accord-ing to the Associated Press (AP).

Col. Hiett will begin a five?month prison term in 2001 for joining his wife on a drug money spending spree. The Pentagon assigned Hiett to supervise over 150 U.S. troops training local forces to combat Colombian drug lords. Laurie Hiett told Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes she was sorry, but that the U.S. Army should be sorry too, for allowing a drug addict to live in Colombia. "It's ironic. It's almost silly," Hiett said.

A method to our madness?

There may be other reasons for U.S. policy towards Colombia. On March 13, in the column "Chopper Wars," Arianna Huffington wrote that more than $400 million of the aid will be spent on 63 helicopters produced by U.S. firms, Sikorsky Aircraft and Bell Helicopter Textron. In the last two election cycles, Textron and its employees donated nearly a million dollars to Republicans and Democrats, Huffington reported. And some of these legislators fought hard on the floor for the aid. Occidental Petroleum, BP Amoco and Enron also lobbied hard for the aid, according to a report in the investigative magazine, NACLA Report on the Americas (July/August 2000). Occidental Petroleum operates the Cano?Limon pipeline in northeastern Colombia. Colombia is currently the seventh?largest supplier of oil to the U.S. and may have the largest untapped pool of petroleum in the Western hemisphere. Dyncorp, a defense contractor and a Fortune 500 company, has a $600 million contract to carry out aerial spraying to eliminate coca. Monsanto manufactures the herbicide that Dyncorp uses according to NACLA.

What are the consequences of this policy?

In July, 300 armed men belonging to Colombia's most feared paramilitary group, a gang with links to the Colombian army, marched onto the basketball court of the small town of El Salado and began calling out names from a list. "A table and chairs were taken from a house, and after the death squad leader had made himself comfortable, the basketball court was turned into a court of execution...The paramilitary troops ordered liquor and music, and then embarked on a calculated rampage of torture, rape and killing," the New York Times reported on July 14, 2000. "They drank and danced and cheered as they butchered us like hogs," a survivor told the NYT. The gang left two days later after torturing and killing at least 36 people -- including a six-year ?old girl and an elderly woman. Just a few miles away, the Colombian police and military set up a roadblock to prevent human rights and relief workers from rescuing residents, according to the NYT. The newspaper called it a "typical operation" of the right wing death squads.

While all parties in the conflict -- guerrillas, army and the paramilitaries -- are human rights violators, international groups say that the paramilitaries are responsible for the majority of such killings. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented the close relationship between the army and paramilitaries. Experts believe that the security forces share intelligence with paramilitaries, quietly provide transportation, vacate zones where abuses are to take place and look the other way while they occur, just like the reports from El Salado. This means the army can keep its hands clean and avoid sanctions for human rights abuses.

The immediate consequence of the military aid is to provide a lot more money to an army that kills civilians, colludes with death squads and runs drugs on the side. It will also strengthen the hand of hardliners within the guerrillas who do not want to negotiate peace. The message we have sent to human rights abusers in the army and paramilitary gangs is clear. It does not matter what happened in El Salado or in the coffee field where schoolchildren were hiking. The check is in the mail.

What should the United States do instead? Our tax dollars should help the people who could eventually bring about a solution in Colombia. They are the thousands of teachers, doctors, lawyers, union organizers, business people, clergy, artists, writers and thinkers who are being forced to leave their country or face certain death. We should support the peace process and human rights. We should provide substantial investment in community-based development pro-grams that offer a real alternative to the destructive production of coca. And the most effective policy will be to emphasize the demand side. The United States should invest greater resources in domestic treatment and prevention programs, including after school and jobs programs for at-risk youth.

Suggested action:

On August 22, days before President Clinton's visit to Cartagena, Colombia, the President waived most of the human rights conditions on the first year (FY2000) of the two-year Colombia aid package, allowing aid to flow. The State Department determined, after a consultative process with US and Colombian non- governmental organizations, that Colombia could not meet most of the human rights conditions attached to the package. Unfortunately, the State Department also recommended the use of the loophole included in the legislation-that the President could waive the conditions for reasons of "national security interest."

The President, State Department and your members of Congress need to hear that US citizens are dismayed that important human rights considerations are set aside so lightly. This is especially important because the second round of decisions on human rights conditions, for the FY2001 aid, will come up again soon, probably in December.

Write to President Clinton, with a copy to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and also write to your members of Congress. Express:

• your disappointment that the President waived the human rights conditions on the Colombia package;
• your belief that human rights should be a number one priority for the United States;
• your concern about ties between the Colombian army and paramilitary forces engaged in brutal acts of violence and
• your hope that the President will send the right message to the Colombian Government and military by not waiving the human rights conditions on the FY2001 aid if the Colombian Government has not acted decisively to meet the conditions.

The conditions call for the Colombian Government to: suspend military officers implicated in human rights violations or aiding and abetting paramilitary groups; ensure the prosecution of such cases by civilian, not military courts; and vigorously prosecute paramilitary leaders. For more details, see the joint document prepared by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Washington Office on Latin America describing why Colombia does not meet the human rights conditions in the legislation. It is available at www.wola.org .

General Assembly guidance:

A 1998 GA resolution acknowledged the violence that kills more than 4,300 Colombians each year. It called upon the Colombian Government to:

(a) make strenuous efforts to curtail the violence and provide protection and assistance to those affected;
(b) ensure that full and impartial investigations into human rights violations against human rights defenders are made...; and
(c) enable access for international human rights organizations...for investigation and humanitarian assistance.

The Assembly further called upon the U.S. Government to monitor human rights concerns in Colombia and the be guided by the requirements of the Foreign Assistance Act in conditioning the provision of foreign aid and assistance on the government's adherence to international human rights standards.