Pubdate: Thu, 20 Jul 2000
Source: New Haven Advocate (CT)
Copyright: 2000 New Mass Media, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/
Author: Paul Bass. E-mail: THANKS, BUT NO THANKS

Hit & Run

Someone congratulate President Clinton. A naval lieutenant sent him a
military medal.

The medal has an anchor and a star in each corner. It has a green ribbon
with two orange stripes. It's a Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal. It
honors "professional achievement," "steadfast devotion to duty ... in
keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service."

President Clinton won this medal by dragging our country into a Vietnam-like
war in Colombia.

Naval Lt. Commander Sylvester Salcedo sent Clinton the medal. Salcedo
originally won the medal himself in 1999 for his work as an intelligence
agent in the war on drugs. He helped break up money-laundering rings in New
York, Miami, Puerto Rico. Before that, he worked in Colombia.

He was proud of the medal. "In the military we don't get pay bonuses," he
says. "Medals and ribbons are always the only sign of distinction and pride
that any military person can have to show your own peers as well as the rest
of the world. It's never easy to give up something like that."

But he did give it up.

Salcedo retired last year from active duty in the Naval Reserves. He's
moving to Bridgeport, where his wife, Sonia Diaz Salcedo, has become the new
schools superintendent. He left the Navy a disillusioned veteran of the war
on drugs.

Salcedo sent Clinton the medal because he has seen the vicious insanity and
injustice of that war in which he served--the cruelty to millions of drug
users locked up instead of treated in this country, the cruelty to peasant
farmers and other civilians about to be killed or starved in Colombia by a
U.S.-inflamed civil war.

Salcedo adds a new voice to the controversies over U.S. drug policy and aid
to Colombia. The U.S. public has remained largely silent about the fact that
we've all but declared war on another country and on ill citizens in our
own. But now a drug warrior has publicly emerged to speak truth to
destructive power.

Salcedo sent Clinton the medal after he learned that the U.S. would give
Colombia $1.3 billion for military helicopters and unlimited "advisers"
(sound like Vietnam?), supposedly to wipe out cocaine production there. In
truth, the U.S. is helping a corrupt government fight a war against
left-wing guerrillas who recently began profiting from the drug trade. The
U.S. is helping spray villages with deadly chemicals that have failed to
wipe out coca, but have killed other crops and poisoned peasants. We're
helping a government that relies on right-wing paramilitary thugs to rape,
torture and massacre civilians.

>From his work, Salcedo knew this war was not just unwinnable, but
backwards. He knew the drug problem is on these shores, with the insatiable
demand of U.S. addicts, not with the suppliers and peasant growers in
Colombia. Burn or poison those coca plants, and other drugs will replace
them on U.S. streets. Keep locking up addicts instead of treating them, and
you'll just produce more criminals.

He saw firsthand how incompetent Colombia's brutal military could be -- how
it could never navigate Colombia's rivers effectively to wipe out coca
production. "We're wasting our money," he says.

In Colombia, Salcedo concluded that the real conflict is a four-decade-old
civil war. Drugs are just a sideshow, a moneymaker for guerrillas, a
convenient pretext for sending foreign aid to the government.

"Today you have a lot of senators and lawmakers in favor of this" Colombian
war, Salcedo observes. Especially the congresspeople and senators in his new
home state of Connecticut. They're addicted to the campaign contributions of
Connecticut's helicopter-making Sikorsky Aircraft, which profits from this
war. These politicians craft reputations for caring about "the children" at
home. Meanwhile, they pave the way for our surrogates -- or maybe our own
troops down the road -- to destroy the lives of Colombian children.

"They can scream and yell about how this is a drug war and it has to be
fought on the front lines in Colombia," Salcedo says. "Respectfully, that is
not so. What you have in Colombia is a fundamental social and economic
distribution problem, as with many of the former Spanish colonies around the
world," including the Philippines, where he grew up.

Lt. Salcedo had something to prove in the drug war. He felt the Navy had
passed him over for promotions because of his race. Superiors told him: You
can sue or quit. Instead, he signed up for full-time active duty to prove
his worth in the big war of the moment.

"If you're trying to win your superiors' attention and admiration, you
volunteer for tough jobs. The Soviet Union went away in 1989. Who are the
next bad guys? The drug lords."

His medal proved a hollow vindication, though. He decided it would serve
better as a tool of protest. As he wrote to President Clinton in a letter
accompanying the returned medal, "[N]arcotics use and abuse are our problems
here at home. ... I implore you to call for an end to the war on drugs as we
know it today. I implore you to call for peace and treatment for those in
need of help to overcome substance abuse. I implore you to call for peace,
compassion and amnesty for those jailed by draconian drug laws, to reunite
families and rebuild communities."

If for some reason President Clinton follows Salcedo's advice, he, too, will
have earned that medal.

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