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18 October 2001 Edition

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Plan Colombia backfires

BY SOLEDAD GALIANA

     
Plan Colombia has meant better equipment and training for the Colombian army, and the spraying of poisonous chemicals that are failing to kill the coca bush, but are killing other crops and farm animals and bringing disease to farmers and their families
Disease, destitution and an increase in coca production are the consequences of the US's military drug-eradication strategy known as Plan Colombia, according to Hugh O'Shaughnessy, author, broadcaster and columnist with The Observer in London. He witnessed all this against the backdrop of ever-increasing violence, military-paramilitary collusion and human rights abuses during his visit to Colombia in June. O'Shaughnessy was in Dublin last week at the invitation of the Latin America Solidarity Centre.

Amnesty International's 2001 Report refers to Plan Colombia as "a controversial Aid package". Plan Colombia was originally designed to seek aid to support the peace process but, as Amnesty's report points out, "was transformed into a predominantly military plan ostensibly aimed at combating illicit drug cultivation".

In July 2000, the Plan received the backing of the US government, which approved funding of $1.3 billion. "In approving the aid, the US Congress added human rights conditions to it, but in August 2000, President Bill Clinton waived most of the human rights conditions on the grounds of American national interests.

So, in practical terms, Plan Colombia has meant better equipment and training for the Colombian army, and the spraying of poisonous chemicals that are failing to kill the coca bush, but are killing other crops and farm animals and bringing disease to farmers and their families.

Hugh O'Shaugnessy travelled to the Putumayo, one of the territories of the Amazones, which is the centre of coca production. "This is a very tough plant," explained O'Shaughnessy referring to the coca bush, from which cocaine is extracted through a chemical process. "It is very difficult to eradicate. In fact, it is very difficult not to get a good harvest out of a coca bush."

Hugh described how since Christmas 2000 the coca farmers "have been attacked from air by spraying planes that pour out from the heavens a sort of poison, which is extremely powerful, that has poisoned the land. It went into the rivers and killed the fish, it went into the people and if it did not kill them, it brought them a great deal of illness.

"I was with a couple of teachers in a primary school and one told me something that happened just before Christmas last year. The spraying planes came over the school at tree top height and went three or four times over their school, a school for kids between five and ten. These spraying planes killed the kids' farm, the animals they had there - rabbits, etc - and three or four times a day, these planes came over, probably piloted by mercenaries from the United States, certainly guarded by helicopter from the US."

Five miles away from the school, O'Shaughnessy visited a little reserve for the indigenous people of the area and met Franci, "a little girl, less than five years old, covered in sores from her armpits down throughout her full body. And she was not by any means the worst affected".

O'Shaughnessy considers that what is happening in Colombia is, as far as the population of the Putumayo is concerned, "diabolic" and is serving no purposes, as the spraying is not effective in eradicating the coca bushes.

"The peasants of the area soon realise that if you cut your coca bush down to its roots within twelve hours after the spraying, that bush will be back producing the coca leaves from which the coca paste is obtained within a month or two," explains O'Shaughnessy.

In fact, it seems to O'Shaughnessy that the US coca eradication plan has only helped to increase production. "Some of the people went into parts of the jungle where the planes have never been, despite all the gadgets that the US government has provided, cut them down and they planted coca in places where there has never been coca plantations before. The result of the fumigation of the coca plantations in Colombia is not a reduction in coca production, it is an increase in coca production. The experts that have studied this, Colombians who know their country better than foreigners do, point out that Colombia is now in a position to grow and supply foreign markets with more tons of cocaine than before the fumigation planes arrived, bringing destruction to the countryside."

And this Plan Colombia is taking place against the backdrop of a very fragmented society. In the Republic of Colombia, a country with 40 million people, two million people are internally displaced. One-twentieth of the population of Colombia are refugees in their own country. A similar number of four million people are in exile in other countries. Fifty-one per cent of Colombia's population lives in poverty. In Colombia, on any average day, there are 70 killings. In Colombia in the year 2000, there were 20,600 killings, of which about 10% or 12% were political. That is around 2,000-3,000 political assassinations per year. There were over 3,000 kidnappings. In Colombia today, there are two million displaced people.

Change is obviously needed, but O'Shaughnessy does not think Plan Colombia is the answer. "The US government is pouring in £1 billion on a set of military forces that are among the world's worst. These people are bestial. They are responsible from a good part of these 70 people dead every day. But they are being reinforced with ammunition, with helicopters, with training in order to back up and defend an establishment in Colombia that does not work and does not deserve being saved.

"The US is backing the army of Colombia. The armed forces of Colombia in their turn back the Death Squads, which were formed to privatise the terror that even the Colombian army could not face without international outrage", says O'Shaughnessy.

The cosy relationship between the military and the paramilitary has been denounced on many occasions by different human rights organisations. Amnesty International's 2001 Report states: "Collusion between the Colombian Security Forces, particularly the army, and paramilitary groups continued and, indeed, strengthened. Instances of collaboration included the sharing of intelligence information, the transfer of prisoners, the provision of ammunition by the armed forces to the paramilitary and join patrols and military operations in which serious human rights violations were committed."

Surprisingly, these paramilitary death squads, the closest allies of the US-funded military forces, have been tied up in drugs trafficking by the DEA, the US agency dealing with drugs trafficking.

After the arrest of the Colombia Three - Jim Monaghan, Niall Connolly and Martin McCauley - the establishment media in Ireland gave a legitimacy to the Colombian military that it does not deserve, argues Gearóid Ó Loinsigh, a member of the Colombia Support Network in Ireland, who will be travelling shortly to Colombia to work with Sembrar, a human rights organisation. "The media argued that the FARC rebels are directly involved in drug trafficking and also quote the military as a body you can trust, whose word you can believe," he said.

"But who are this Colombian military? Some of those officers who were involved in the setting up of the Death Squads are now in the high ranks of the army. Jario Bedolla, who set up the first one, the AAA, became a commander-in-chief of the Colombian Army.

"General Bonnet is now the military attaché in the Colombian Embassy in Greece. When he was in charge of the Third Brigade in Cali, this brigade carried out the Trujillo Massacre. Sixty-eight peasants were quartered with chainsaws. There are places in Colombia were people have been quarter with chainsaws by the Colombian military and their body parts were delivered to their families wrapped up nicely for them. These are the people who were quoted as legitimate acceptable sources of information."




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