August 13, 2000

This Drug War isn't All About Drugs

by Jim Hightower

See if this sounds at all familiar to you: In a faraway land, a civil war has been raging for decades, pitting peasant rebels against the military of the ruling elites; our government, which has taken sides with the elites, begins a propaganda campaign to demonize the rebels, asserting that their insurgency is a threat to our own national security. Next, Washington begins to send military equipment to the wobbly ruling government; however, the rebels make big gains in the countryside, so we escalate the shipment of arms to fight them, even sending over "military advisors" to train the troops of the elites.

This is not just a summary of our country's early involvement in the quagmire of Vietnam, but also a chronicle of Washington's recent moves to sink us ever deeper into a civil war in Colombia. The rationale is that all-purpose bugaboo: the "War on Drugs."

About 80% of the cocaine coming into the U.S. comes from Colombia, and our government has been shoveling military aid into Colombia for years in an effort to destroy the drug production at its source. Colombia--a nation of 40 million people about one and a half times the size of Texas--was the third-largest recipient of U.S. military and foreign-aid money last year, receiving nearly $300 million. This year, a whopping $1.3 billion in aid wound its way through the appropriations process in Congress.

Why so much money and military might to destroy a few coca fields? Because in the remote lowlands of southern Colombia, the coca farmers are protected by a guerrilla army, as many as 20,000 strong, who since the late 1970s have been funding their operations by taxing coca cultivation in return for protecting the growers from government forces. For four decades, the civil war in Colombia has had the country teetering on the brink of chaos.

The current Colombian president, Andres Pastrana, was elected in 1998 largely on promises that he would finally bring an end to the unwinnable war and return stability and peace to Colombia. Last year, the government started talking with the largest rebel group in the country, and Pastrana is now planning peace talks with the second-largest rebel army.

But a negotiated end to the war is unlikely while we're promoting a drug war and the Colombian government wants to shore up its bargaining position by winning battles in the countryside. Escalating the war with billions of dollars in U.S. aid will only drive the guerrillas away from the peace table. And despite all the U.S.-funded coca eradication efforts, the last five years have seen a doubling of coca production in Colombia.

Rather than learning from history, we've now bought into something called "Plan Colombia," for which President Pastrana is asking $3.5 billion over the next three years (see, Plan Colombia: A Closer Look). Right now he's looking to Europe for billions in development aid. But Europe isn't eager to play this game. "There is a feeling that this is a primarily military plan and that we are being asked to clean up the mess that the Americans are going to make," one European diplomat told the New York Times.

The object of Plan Colombia, which was cooked up last year by the Colombian and U.S. governments, is to retake the 40% of the country currently controlled by the guerrillas. The theory is that the coca plantations can only be wiped out if the government regains control of the countryside. Approximately 80% of the $1.3 billion in the U.S. aid package will go to the Colombian Armed Forces so they can attack the rebels who run most of southern Colombia. (To reassure us that the military will reform its record of brutality against the peasants, $122 million was set aside for "programs to promote human rights and justice in the region.")

The U.S. already has more than 200 military advisors and trainers stationed in Colombia--not to teach coca eradication, but rather for infantry and explosives training and lessons in ambush techniques. Our military is even building an intelligence center in the country, feeding it information from our spy satellites. If we peasants don't start saying "no" as loudly as we can to our elected officials, Colombia could become another Vietnam--getting us mired once again in a shooting war and destroying another Third World nation--this time in the name of our failed war on drugs.

The largest, oldest, and richest guerrilla group in Colombia is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. It is a force of well-armed fighters who are not dependent on foreign support because they have the money (from taxes on coca fields and kidnappings of wealthy Colombians) to purchase arms on the international market. The FARC argue that they are not a narco-trafficking organization--they only protect and tax the peasants who cultivate the coca.

The FARC has popular support in the rural south, which makes them tough to eradicate; but eradicating the cocaine trade is tougher still because the majority of the drug traffickers who process and export the drugs are in northern Colombia, in the territory controlled by some 8,000 paramilitary troops--a/k/a armed thugs. These guys are allied with the corrupt half of the Colombian Army and according to Human Rights Watch were responsible for 78% of the human-rights violations in the country in 1999.

And how will our government keep that billion bucks out of the hands of the corrupt Colombian military or their allies in the paramilitary death squads? We thought of that, they say: The $1.3 billion Plan Colombia aid will only go to Colombian Army units cleared of human-rights abuses. But units like that are so hard to find that the Colombian military has had to create three new battalions, just so they'll be "clean."

In fact, for years the biggest threat to democracy in Colombia has been the Colombian military and its paramilitary allies. In the 1980s, after FARC signed a cease-fire with the government, its political party, the Patriotic Union, entered into presidential, congressional and municipal elections. What happened to these would-be democrats? More than 2,000 Patriotic Union candidates were assassinated by the Colombian military and paramilitaries. The FARC's new political party is a clandestine organization whose members remain anonymous in order to stay alive.

So why is Congress behind this $1.3 billion boondoggle? One reason is that, globally, more money is spent buying weapons and drugs than any other commodity. But here's another clue: One of the principal lobbyists for the aid bill was Lawrence P. Meriage, the vice president of Los Angeles-based Occidental Oil and Gas Company. Occidental is currently enmeshed in a battle with the U'wa, an indigenous tribe in Colombia, over oil-drilling rights on what the U'wa claim are their traditional lands (see, The Case of the U'wa).

The U'wa representative in Bogotá, Ebaristo Tegria Uncarria, told us that the Colombian government probably will tell the courts to give Occidental the green light for drilling as a pay-off for the Oxy vice-president doing such a good job on Congress. That, in turn, will give the Colombian military and the paramilitaries their cue to kill more U'wa protesters. And which U.S. presidential candidate is a major shareholder in Occidental Petroleum? Al Gore, the environmental candidate, that's who; Papa Gore was on the Oxy board of directors for years. Colombia has a wealth of untapped oil and gas reserves. Washington and U.S. corporations are considering a gas pipeline to run the length of the Americas from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, and they don't want the FARC getting in the way of that.

And then there's the proposed Darien Canal, which might some day connect the Caribbean and the Pacific through northern Colombia. The Darien would be wider than the Panama Canal, so it could handle the world's biggest ships, many of which are presently barred from Panama. It will be a lot easier to get insurance on these two mega-projects if there's a "stable" political regime in Colombia, meaning one that is willing to roll over for Washington and Wall Street.

For all the babble about drugs and democracy, oil and shipping may be the real reasons why Congress has allocated billions to fight the peasant warriors in Colombia, while allocating just $75 million to help the world's 40 most heavily indebted countries struggle free of debt and poverty.

And how about those peace talks? We've thrown tons of diplomatic weight behind the Middle East and Northern Ireland peace processes, but now Washington ignores negotiations in Colombia between the guerrillas and the Colombian government. Uppity peasants in our own backyard in Central or South America are just not good for business. Since Cuba's economic collapse following the end of the Cold War, the last backyard uppities are the FARC.

While we're spending billions to wage a war against drugs in Colombia, the average Colombian thinks (correctly) that the real drug problem is right here in the United States. If there wasn't a seemingly insatiable demand for cocaine and heroin in the U.S., the farmers down there wouldn't waste their time growing coca and poppies.

Wouldn't our billions be better spent trying to wipe out our addiction problem rather than dousing the Colombian countryside with herbicides? You'd think so--but then, no one's ever gone broke overestimating the cynicism of our representatives in Congress. Even though studies consistently show that increasing drug treatment is the most effective way to reduce drug use, 60% of the money spent to fight drugs goes toward law enforcement and incarceration.

Who's snorting, shooting, and smoking all this coke, crack, and smack? Seventy-four percent of U.S. drug users are white. But who's being locked up? Mostly those poor blacks who see the profitable drug industry as their quickest--or only--ticket to the American dream. While only 11% of America's illicit drug users are African-American, they account for 37% of those arrested for drug violations. According to the Justice Department, 70% of U.S. prisoners are in for drug offenses, or were drug users when they committed their crimes. There are more Americans in prison than there are on active duty in the military.

And where's all this incarceration getting us? Of the 1.5 million people arrested in 1996 for drug-law violations, 75% were busted for simple possession; the smugglers and kingpins remain free to wheel and deal with their Colombian connections.

Jim Hightower is the author of the book, If the Gods had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates. He also publishes a monthly newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown, and hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show. This article previously appeared in The Hightower Lowdown. For more information about Jim Hightower visit: http://www.junction-city.com/hightower/

Copyright 2000 Public Intelligence Inc.

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