Column: Our Life and Times
December 1999

U.S. hikes military presence in Colombia

by Kevin A. Barry and Mary Holmes

The Clinton administration sent two high-level officials-General Barry McCaffrey, Clinton's drug policy director, and Thomas Pickering, the undersecretary of state-to Colombia in late August, where they proposed to President Andres Patrana upwards of $1.3 billion in aid over a period of three years. These funds are earmarked almost exclusively for the military and its war against guerrilla armies-the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN)-which now control some 40% of the country. McCaffrey characterized the situation as a "growing emergency in the region."

The U.S. already funds the training and equipping of a 1,000-man anti-narcotics army battallion; it already shares intelligence with the Colombian army; it already has some 300 U.S. military "advisors" in the country at any given time. In 1999, the Clinton administration has funneled $300 million worth of helicopters, ammunition and military training into Colombia, which is now the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid, behind Israel and Egypt.

In mid-November, one of the U.S.-trained marine units was attacked for the first time during military clashes in a coordinated offensive mounted by FARC. It was reported to be the heaviest fighting since FARC's mid-July offensive, which took them nearly to the outskirts of Bogota. The latest fighting seems to have been the final blow to the tentative government-guerrilla peace talks that reopened Oct. 24.

On that date, one of the most massive anti-war protests ever in Latin America was held across the country. At least two million people marched in Bogota, another one million in Medellin-altogether some five million in hundreds of cities and towns-under the slogan "No mas" (No more), demanding an immediate ceasefire, accelerated peace negotiations, and an end to violence against civilians perpetrated by the army, right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing guerrillas.

The Oct. 24 demonstrations were not tied to the government or political parties. Civilians have borne the worst of the fighting and the 35,000 deaths in the past three decades. Nearly one million people are now displaced internally within Colombia, forced to flee either from military battles or from actual coercion, particularly by paramilitary death squads who have increasingly taken over, with the cooperation of local military officers, the army's "dirty war."

The Colombian masses are also experiencing the worst economic recession in half a century. Urban unemployment is now measured at 20%; the jobless grew by 400,000 in the last 12-month period and were mostly women and youth. Inflation has been brought "down" to 10%. Over half the populace lives in outright poverty. Trade unions have mounted over a dozen strikes so far this year, including a general strike of workers, peasants and community organizations held the beginning of September. But Pastrana says he will not alter his economic austerity program in order to obtain a $3 billion IMF bail out.

Opposition has come from many sectors. Yanacona Indians are demanding the government allow them to manually destroy heroin poppy plants, instead of continuing to spray defoliants which contaminate people, crops and the environment. About $30 million in current U.S. aid goes to narcotic crop eradication, primarily through herbicide spraying, but that will go up to $114 million in the funding now being discussed in the U.S. Congress.

Uwa Indians have occupied land outside their state-designated "reservation," on which the government has granted exploitation rights to the U.S. Occidental Petroleum Corp. The Uwa have fought to block the oil company through legal channels and, at one point, threatened to commit mass suicide in protest. They are demanding that Pastrana rescind the drilling contract and that Occidental leave.

As the U.S. Congress considers the proposed $1.5 billion mostly-military-aid package, Democrat Clinton is getting support from Republicans who consider the countries bordering Colombia "front-line states." One Republican senator warned that the conflict in Colombia is in danger of spilling over into southern Panama, "a mere 500 miles from the U.S. border." These echoes of the "rationale" for U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980s, especially in El Salvador, are ominous.

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