Pubdate: Tue, 22 May 2001
Source: Guardian, The (UK)
Copyright: 2001 Guardian Newspapers Limited
Contact:  http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/guardian/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/175
Author: George Monbiot

BUSH'S DIRTY WAR

Colombia's Peasant Farmers Are Being Driven Off Their Land. And We Are Helping

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 Dollars 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 Dollars 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?
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake