NEWS & LETTERS, March-April 2010
U.S. finances murderous Plan Colombia
Cali, Colombia--The scene: a rural home, early in the morning. All of a sudden, the booming sound of a very low-flying helicopter. A little girl asks, "Mommy, what's that?" Casually, someone answers, "Those are the gringos that are coming to bomb our country."
The little girl, her doll in tow, ducks under the kitchen table looking for a safe place to hide. A house in the country isn't any place to hide from a helicopter, because it was built to house a family that merely wants to live in peace. It is not meant to be a bunker.
For the children in Colombia and all over the world that are affected by it, political violence is a cruel reality. They don't see war on TV, but live amidst the bombs, many of them victims, so-called "collateral damage."
In Colombia it's become common to see helicopters flying to the conflict zones. A Blackhawk helicopter costs about $500 an hour to maintain. The national budget is eaten up by war. This includes the foreign dollars that are earmarked to prolong the conflict.
The arming of Plan Colombia isn't free: the estimated U.S. support in 2010 is about $456 million. The U.S. government donates, but the arms providers don't then in turn make the guns free. Money passes from the U.S. government to the particular companies that deal in arms. This means arms manufacturers aren't interested in ending the war, or the drug trade. Whole industries and companies thrive on the war on drugs: contractors, assessors, fumigation chemical manufacturers. They keep politicians in power, they legislate and fund this war supposedly against narco-trafficking.
The Colombian military budget for 2010 is $11 million. That's good for arms manufacturers, which are mainly North American companies. It's hard to see a way to peace, or to the end of drug trafficking this way. The way to combat drugs is to throw out the representatives of the drug traffickers who hold government posts and make policy. In Colombia, 70 members of Congress are being investigated for ties with paramilitary bands, run and financed by drug mafias. The armed forces play their part in the drug trade. The infamous Blue cartel was full of military personnel.
A delegation of British Parliamentarians, senior trade union leaders and labor lawyers visited recently and met with trade unionists, government officials, politicians, political prisoners, peace activists, farmers, relatives of FARC hostages and the relatives of the innocent civilians executed by the army who pretended they were guerrilla fighters in order to inflate the number of combat deaths.
Having heard their testimony about the real impact of Plan Colombia money, they concluded: "We believe that: 1) the army is responsible for the majority of human rights abuses against the civilian population and a lack of government action to address the abuses makes them complicit and culpable in the continuation of such abuses; 2) the abuses are systematic, widespread and continuing; 3) paramilitary activity continues, particularly in rural areas, and there is evidence of continuing links with the army."
The right-wing government in Colombia hasn't only tolerated massacres. They've actually provided arms--many of which have been purchased with money from Plan Colombia--to the criminal bands that carry them out. Tax dollars paid by U.S. citizens are used to fund atrocities like the massacre in the conflict-neutral community of San José de Apartadó (Urabá Antioquia). In an act that will almost surely heighten the conflict, the Colombian government has recently decided to give 10 military bases to the U.S. Army.
(Translated by Brown Douglas.)
--Leo Alcantúz
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