Pubdate: Fri, 9 Jan 2009
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2009 Los Angeles Times
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/bc7El3Yo
Website: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Chris Kraul, Reporting from Bogota, Colombia
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Plan+Colombia
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Barack+Obama
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Colombia

Q & A WITH COLOMBIAN DEFENSE MINISTER JUAN MANUEL SANTOS

Santos Will Meet With Barack Obama Soon After Inauguration to Try To 
Persuade Him to Continue Plan Colombia, the $556-Million-A-Year U.S. 
Aid Plan. He Discusses the Case He Will Make.

Soon after President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration, Colombian 
Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos will fly to Washington to lobby 
for continuance of Plan Colombia, the largest U.S. foreign aid 
program outside the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Colombian leaders face a steep challenge: persuading the new 
administration to maintain $556 million a year in military and 
economic aid as it braces for an era of trillion-dollar deficits. 
Santos will have to fend off critics who say Plan Colombia has fallen 
short of its coca eradication goals and that the military's 
battlefield gains against leftist rebels have been stained by human 
rights abuses, including "false positives" -- the killing of innocent 
civilians passed off as battle casualties.

But Santos, the Harvard-educated scion of a family that operates and 
partly owns his country's biggest newspaper, El Tiempo, argues that 
dramatic battlefield successes against the left-wing Revolutionary 
Armed Forces of Colombia guerrillas, known as the FARC, and 
Colombia's importance as a U.S. ally in an often unfriendly region 
are reason for Obama to not "pull the rug out from under us."

Santos was interviewed Thursday by The Times in Bogota.

This is not an ideal time to be going to Washington to look for money.

The way we see it, the cost of support for Colombia is small in 
relation to the $1-trillion deficit, but that the usefulness of this 
help is huge and at minimal cost compared to Iraq, for example.

When it started in 2000, Colombia was not in the hands of the state 
but in those of paramilitaries and the guerrillas. I remember in 
2000, when President Clinton came to Cartagena just before Plan 
Colombia started, the country was on the verge of becoming a failed 
state. Today, we are one of the most solid democracies, where 
institutions are working, where the scandals such as false positives 
have come to light because of those functioning institutions.

We are winning, but we haven't won yet. This could backfire very 
rapidly. [The end of Plan Colombia] is what the rebels want.

How has Plan Colombia helped Colombia achieve this?

Military training, intelligence, strengthening of institutions and, 
of course, the added military capacity that has resulted from things 
like [Black Hawk] helicopters that we have received through Plan 
Colombia. It's the quality of the help we get that matters. The 
quality of training, of the intelligence, for example, which doesn't 
cost the United States anything but which we can't produce ourselves.

And 2008 was a good year?

Last year was the best year for the Colombian armed forces in all its 
history. First, there was political progress in that people mobilized 
as never before to demonstrate against the FARC. Secondly, the number 
of demobilized rebels rose to 3,480, the highest level in history. 
Thirdly, after 44 years of our military not being able to touch the 
FARC leadership -- the seven-member secretariat -- three of them fell 
in 2008. Fourth, the spectacular rescue in July [of three U.S. 
defense contractors, former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt 
and 11 others] was so extraordinary that it created a euphoria and 
self-confidence in our military, and among all Colombians.

A General Accounting Office report said Plan Colombia has fallen 
short of its goal to reduce coca crops by 50%. After years of 
spraying and manual eradication, crops haven't shrunk much.

I think the United Nations report [on which the GAO based its 
findings] contains an underlying error in the number of hectares it 
says are still cultivated with coca. But look at the other links of 
our policy: how all the cartels are dismantled, all the capos who 
were on the FBI most-wanted list have been jailed, look at all the 
cocaine laboratories destroyed, how the tons of cocaine seized by the 
police almost doubled in 2008. Why? Because we are retaking control 
of our territory.

And there was the "false positives" scandal in which soldiers looking 
for promotions killed possibly hundreds of civilians who were then 
claimed as guerrillas killed in action.

We have taken action, with a set of policies to guarantee justice, 
and have told our soldiers that demobilizations, not killings, of 
rebels are what count. We fired 45 officers and soldiers for sins of 
commission and omission. I have no doubt that the Colombian army is 
receiving more human rights training than any on Earth.

President-elect Obama is not known as an aficionado of Latin America, 
and has never visited here. Does that worry you?

No, because Obama has a Cabinet that has many people who know Latin 
America. Vice President-elect Joseph Biden was one of the fathers of 
Plan Colombia.

How will you persuade Obama that Colombia deserves the aid?

I want to say: Listen, we're a success story here, asking for minimal 
financial commitment compared with your other problems, so don't 
sacrifice something that's much more important than the value of the 
dollars you have invested. It's in the interest of the U.S. to 
maintain a strong democracy in Colombia. And Plan Colombia is one of 
the determinants. 
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake