ANKLE DEEP IN THE BIG MONEY
Earlier this week, the U.S. Senate approved over $1 billion in aid to shore
up the current regime in Colombia. Next in the legislative process is some
kind of joint House-Senate bill that will be sent to the White House.
Although it is taking longer than the White House had hoped, all sources
point to a done deal soon. Despite the claims of drug czar General
McCafferty, this money has very little to do with fighting drugs and
everything to do with shoring up the government in that country. Indeed,
the United States let it be known during the week of July 26, 1999, that it
has "a couple hundred" troops in Colombia training elite battalions whose
job will be to sever the ties between the coca and opium farmers and the
revolutionary forces. Of course, as any
one with a basic knowledge of prior Pentagon training missions in other
parts of the world is aware, these trainers often participate in military
missions and may even
denote an even greater U.S. involvement in the future.
In order to understand what exactly the Pentagon means in describing these
battalions' mission, it is essential to examine the relationship between
the peasant coca
and opium farmers and the revolutionary organizations. To understand this
relationship, it is first necessary to understand the role drug production
plays in the
economy of Colombia. The peasants have two basic choices in today's
Colombia--to go to the big cities for work and risk ending up as beggars
and prostitutes or
farm the land. If they choose the latter, they till the land and usually
plant crops such as corn or plantains. Since these areas were never
developed, there are no
transportation routes. Only by using the rivers and crossing hundreds of
miles overland can the crop reach Bogota or other markets. By the time it
gets there, the
crop is often unsaleable or has become so costly that the profit is
practically lost. There is only one alternative open to the peasant farmer
who wishes to subsist:
growing coca leaves and, more recently, opium plants. Transportation costs
for these crops is provided by the drug lords, who move incredible amounts
of these
products with the consent of high placed government leaders and the armed
protection of the Colombian military and paramilitary forces funded by
large landowners
and drug lords.
The FARC and ELN guerrilla forces operate in the coca and opium growing
regions. Indeed, they literally administer these regions. Like various
parts of southern
Vietnam that were in the control of the NLF, the residents of the region
consider the
revolutionary forces as their government and support their administration.
In order to pay the cost of running schools, health care centers, police
forces, and other
such infrastructural apparatus, the FARC and ELN forces tax the drug
trafficking operations--farmers and those involved in the product's
transportation and
refinement. Although it is their preference not to do support the
dependency of the farming population on drug production, the reality is
that this is where the money
is in rural Colombia.
This is where the United States comes in, once again. Most of these drugs
are shipped to the streets of our country. This does not happen without the
complicity of
government and law enforcement officials. In some cases, this means turning
the other way when a shipment from a trafficker who has paid off the right
people
comes through. In other cases, the complicity is much more involved. Even
those of us with rather short memories can remember the U.S. involvement in
the
drugs-for-guns operation run b Ollie North and his cohorts that supplied
the contra forces fighting the Nicaraguan government in the 1980s. This
operation (not the
first of its kind, by the way--see Alfred McCoy's 1991 book The Politics of
Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Trade) can be considered a model of
how U. S.
government agencies cynically manipulate modern society's desire for
pharmaceutically induced escape to finance their dirty operations in the
service of various
corporate interests.
Speaking of corporate interests, if we follow the trail this leads us down
we may discover the most fundamental reason of them all for the U. S.
interest in Colombia:
oil. Oil is the most important commodity in Colombia. It represented over
one-fourth of the country's exports in 1996 and close to 5% of its Gross
National Product
(GNP). In comparison, coffee represented 15.2 % and 3.4 %, respectively.
Interestingly, few private Colombian citizens have any significant
investment in the oil
industry. Instead, the majority of the exploration and refinement interests
are controlled by a state company known as Ecopetrol, which serves as a
conduit for
foreign oil companies, primarily British Petroleum (recently merged with
Amoco to form the world largest oil company and may help to explain the
increased desire
for a greater U.S. military role in the country)and Occidental Petroleum
(which is heavily invested in by Al Gore's family and is currently
attempting to drill on lands considered sacred by the indigenou U'wa
peoples).
Over the course of the thirty-year war, support for the revolutionary
forces has expanded into the cities. This is due to the ever-widening
disparity between the
wealthy and the rest of the Colombian population and the military's harsh
repression of those who organize the workers and the unemployed. Literally
hundreds of
labor organizers, social justice workers (clerics and laypersons) and
student activists have been murdered and disappeared since the late 1980s.
In fact, in 1990,
when the revolutionary groups put down their arms and formed political
parties, they were murdered wholesale by the military and their
paramilitary allies. Such
murderous actions push both activists and their supporters to a conclusion
that armed struggle is the only workable strategy for the kind of social
change they seek.
In terms of the region, the recent election of and popular mandate for
President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and his policies makes the United States
awfully
nervous. As leftist webmaster and history professor Jay Moore of Vermont
stated in a July letter to various email groups formed during last spring's
NATO
adventure in Yugoslavia, Venezuela is next door to Colombia and provides
more oil to the U. S. than any other country. Should Chavez withstand the
certain
opposition he will face from internal and external reactionary forces and
put his democratic and socialist-oriented policies in place in his country,
the United States
will have to deal with a popularly elected left-leaning government in its
"backyard" for the first time since the Chilean government of Salvador
Allende. As history
tells us, this means those U.S. citizens who support true democracy and
oppose the neo-liberal agenda of the corporation and their cohorts in our
government must
do every thing in their power to oppose any attempts to destroy the Chavez
government. As for Colombia, we must oppose any and all U. S. military
intervention in
that country--whether this intervention comes in the forms of "drug war"
aid, trainers, advisers, or troops of any kind.
-
Ron Jacobs
Burlington, VT
http://moose.uvm.edu/~rjacobs/ronshome.html
http://moose.uvm.edu/~rjacobs/iaag.htm
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