Pubdate: Mon, 4 Sep 2000 Source: Times Record News (TX) Copyright: 2000 The E.W. Scripps Co. Contact: 1301 Lamar, Wichita Falls, TX 76301 Fax: 940/767-1741 Feedback: http://www.trnonline.com/opinions2/letters/form.shtml Website: http://www.trnonline.com/ Author: Steve Clements, editorial columnist for TR News WE'RE THE BAD GUYS - GET US OUT OF COLOMBIAN AFFAIRS Beats me why all you right-wingers hate Bill Clinton so much. With each passing day of his administration, he's morphing into Ronald Reagan. Soft on drugs? During his eight years in office, Clinton has been the United States' No. 1 drug warrior. He pumped three times as much money into the war on drugs as presidents Reagan and Bush, those anti-drug pillars of conservatism. So maybe Clinton smoked pot, even though he says he didn't inhale. He's spent the better part of the '90s making up for that youthful lapse in judgment and - unsuccessfully, it seems - fighting his image as a weak- kneed nancy boy when it comes to narcotics. Now he wants to pour more than a billion dollars into a South American country to prop up what's essentially a right-wing dictatorship with a brutal human-rights record. Does any of this sound familiar - like an '80s flashback, even? He wants to donate $1.3 billion of my money - and yours - to the government of Colombia, to aid that nation in its war on drugs, which, of course, is actually our war on drugs. After all, the United States smokes, snorts and shoots most of the world's drug supply, so, without us, the Colombian drug cartels would effectively go bankrupt. I have a problem with this particular foreign aid for several reasons. First, as you might already realize, is the money: $1.3 billion would feed a lot of hungry babies in our country. To put it in perspective, it would also buy us four Lake Ringgolds or 65 MPEC coliseums - projects that a lot of people think are prohibitively expensive. And if the money was going to feed hungry babies in Colombia, I probably wouldn't have a problem with it. But, as we've discovered through experience, these funds will undoubtedly find their way into the pockets of a few fat-cat generals and jefes, while poor farmers are still forced to grow poppies and cocoa plants to feed their families. Another thing: I'm tired of South Americans hating me for no other reason than my citizenship in a nation that has too often meddled in banana republic politics. While Clinton was preparing for his trip to Colombia last week, news reports showed government workers scrubbing the proverbial "Yanqui go home" and other anti-U.S. slogans off walls in Bogota neighborhoods and commercial districts. They probably don't know that a lot of people in Texas share that sentiment. But you can discard that jingoism and those notions about nationalism and financial responsibility, and you're still left with the biggest objection: It's wrong. Morally, ethically, fiscally - viewed from any direction, it's wrong. It's wrong to take this war to the growers of Colombia. These people are merely satisfying a pillar of our capitalistic society: the law of supply and demand. We demand drugs. They supply them. We've already turned our inner cities into battlegrounds, using shock troops trained by domestic law-enforcement agencies. Now we're sending military advisers and equipment into a third-world country to fight peasants armed with hoes and scythes and whose only crime is supplying us with the drugs we demand. I know, I know - the drug problem in Colombia goes way beyond the farmers who grow the crops. And I know that the drug rings are responsible for a lot of the violence that's wracked that country over the years. But I also know this: Of the Colombian drug cartels, only the Cali group has ever been busted by the government. Those cartels have been churning out cocaine (and now heroin) for at least 15 years. Even in their heyday, when J. Edgar Hoover let them have the run of the nation's underground, more than one American mob family found itself under attack by law enforcement. In 15 years, the Colombian government should have taken down more than one cartel. So what do we surmise from that? If it's not obvious to you by now, please refrain from using power tools in the future. But let me spell it out, anyway: The government is a conspirator, a major player, in the drug trade. Notice I didn't say Colombian government. That's right - look down your nose at the Mexicans, the Panamanians and the Colombians, because their drug fighters have been getting arrested for years for taking payoffs and making money from the narcotics business. But we're not innocent, not by a long shot. Over the years, plenty of American drug warriors have been caught with their fingers in the "cokie" jar. The latest Yanqui drug gladiator to bite the dust - literally - was Col. James Hiett. Now, you could probably imagine a poorly paid U.S. private cozying up to drug dealers in an effort to supplement his poverty-level wages. But Hiett was the big dog, the commander in charge of U.S. anti-drug operations in Colombia. Hiett hasn't been accused of using drugs or selling them. But his cokehead wife, Laurie, was caught smuggling heroin packages valued at $700,000 into the United States. She even used the U.S. diplomatic postal service to do her dirty work. Colombians accused embassy officials of covering up the scale of the smuggling operation run by the officer's wife, of trying to pretend that her intercepted parcel was an isolated incident. They were especially angered, though, by the sentence handed down to her husband, the colonel, who was convicted of covering up his wife's drug dealing. He got five months. Less than half a year in jail for proving that his nation's drug policy is rife with hypocrisy and shot through with corruption that infects the United States to its highest levels of leadership. It's not only the military. In recent years, respected U.S. banks, politicians and civilian law-enforcement authorities fell from grace because of their drug connections. Not too long ago, nearly every elected official in a Rio Grande Valley county was indicted by a federal grand jury investigating drug payoffs. South Americans know the logic-defying double standard: We would kill for our drugs, and we would kill to keep drugs out of our country. Is it any wonder they hate us? They also know that we're paying the bills for a Colombian military that turns a blind eye to atrocities committed by right-wing paramilitary death squads - if the military's not actually aiding the executioners with money, training and troops. In July, according to a New York Times report, one of those government- backed death squads marched into a peasant village in northern Colombia. Over the course of the next three days, they got drunk, boogied down to music performed by villagers forced to play for their lives - and tortured and killed more than 70 people they accused of collaborating with left-wing guerrillas. As the Times reporter quoted one villager: "To them, it was like a big party. They drank and danced and cheered as they butchered us like hogs." Most of the dead were men who certainly could have helped guerrilla forces. But the killers also executed at least one child, a 6-year-old girl whose worst crime could have been nothing more than stealing candy from another kid. The Colombian military and police forces had headquarters only a few miles from the village. And no, they didn't help with the massacre - not exactly. But they set up a roadblock down the road from the village, preventing relief agencies and human-rights groups from coming to the peasants' aid. They had to dam up access to the village, they claimed, because the paramilitaries were battling guerrilla forces, making the immediate area too dangerous. So maybe the Colombian military - and, by extension, the Colombian government - doesn't officially murder its people. But there's still plenty of evidence that suggests otherwise. And these are the folks we've thrown our weight behind? Is it me, or does it seem like we always back the bad guys in these South American conflicts? If this were a movie, a lone American - usually played by Arnold Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris - would spy the torture and killing and concoct a plan to rescue the defenseless villagers, usually at the expense of a corrupt military leader. In the end, the day would be saved, thanks to a little U.S. intervention. But all we've got is Willie Boy, who is indeed riding to the rescue - of the bad guys. If this were a movie, he'd be played by a fat, sweaty, beady-eyed guy in a wrinkled white suit. And in the final reel, he'd be thrown through a banana-threshing machine by our hero - sacrificed for the sins of all ugly Americans. Yup, in the United States, we like our happy endings - and our coke and smack. In Colombia, I think, the people would just like to stay alive. So, yeah - Yanqui go home. And stay there this time. Steve Clements' editorial column appears in this space on Mondays. Clements is the city editor of the Times Record News - --- MAP posted-by: John Chase